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Consider the book you are holding to be your own Film 101 course, a beginner’s course in “film appreciation,” or “film study” if you like.

I assume you have already seen lots of movies, and know what types of motion pictures you favor over others. You know what actors you like or dislike. You may also know something about film directors, and eagerly await new releases from your favorites. In this sense, you are at a tremendous advantage over the art appreciation student, who may not have visited many galleries, or the music appreciation student, who may not know much about Viennese composers. And of course, your vast movie-going experience has informed you, at least intuitively, about plot—that is, how matters should wrap up and give your viewing experience a sense of being whole. You know when you’ve been cheated because the story ends implausibly or with a thud. When the story ends agreeably—not always “happily”—you leave the theatre (or eject the DVD from your player) with a sense of fulfillment.

But you will get as much from this book—analyses of images, cuts, sounds, and overall meaning. I explain why and show you how.

MOVIES INTO FILM

When you do allow your professor (or this book) to present motion pictures to you in these ways, a magic thing happens: you may turn movies into films. It’s a good thing we have these two words in our language. Movies are largely entertainments, gobbled down and forgotten like a cheap, drive-thru hamburger. Films, on the other hand, have potential to be works of art or literature. They have staying power. They continue to move us decade after decade.

William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Katherine Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) deliver truths about war. Best Years conveys truths about the end of WWII, when people didn’t know what to do with their lives. The Hurt Locker is about addiction to risk and danger, even death. Your typical movie presents life as we wish it to be—when people went back to work and family as usual after war or were totally unaffected by combat. Wyler and Bigelow knew better.

We may disagree. What might be a film for me could be a movie to you. And vice versa. But if you take my invitation to get serious about photography, editing, and sound—as well as meaning—you may begin to perceive art, truth, and something close to real life in the motion pictures of your life, and thus enrich your film viewing experience. You might also enrich your life.

TO THE INTERNET

Just as a film professor would show you still images, clips, and entire films, I am going to take you to the Internet now and then to show you clips of significance. And I’ll suggest dozens of noteworthy films for you to watch.

Since paper books do not, as you know, let you navigate the Internet, I can’t just drop them in this book.

These are shots taken from a camera placed directly over the subject. There is seldom a need for such shots in most films. But in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) there is considerable need as James Stewart goes all queasy when he finds himself in high places. Below is a link to a scene that contains two cutaways meant to simulate Stewart’s condition of vertigo as he forces Kim Novak to climb rickety stairs in an old California historical landmark.

Vertigo

I HAVE . . .

. . . taught film “appreciation” and filmmaking for thirty years in a California community college. I have reached students of all ages and walks of life—because community colleges have wider doors than any other level of higher education. They just do not exclude. I even had a blind student who did very well in the film study class with the help of her sighted daughter. Plus I had a nearly blind student in the filmmaking class who did a mostly black film with sound that suggested what it was like to be blind.

. . . published five books about films. Go to Amazon and find my latest book, which I call Spiritual Films: The Secular Approach.

. . . won awards in the United States and Europe for short dramatic films I have made.

Frame

Think of five film frames: extreme long shot, long shot, medium shot, close-up, and extreme close-up. Each has specific uses in the language of film.

EXTREME LONG SHOTS

These provide a distant view of people and events. No one person is individualized, as in the shot linked below from the David Lean masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence of Arabia

Settings dominate in ELSs. The next photo shows you another desert in Mexico where a nanny has lost her way.

Babel

The film is Babel (2006), directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Like all ELSs, the frame could have been tighter. It could have shown a look of desperation on the woman’s face. In fact, the film does this several times. But Iñárritu felt he needed more. He wanted to place the nanny very small and very lost-looking in the barren setting. An extreme long shot was the perfect frame for this.

Below is a link to a famous extreme long shot. At this point in the story, director Victor Fleming had already shown you what Dorothy and her companions look like up close. Now he wanted to show you the fantastic Emerald City. The flowered hillocks are lovely, too. Again, in ELSs, setting, not characters, dominates.

The Wizard of Oz

And another extreme long shot from The Pianist (2002). The lone figure is a Jew who has escaped from the ghetto in war-torn Warsaw. Director Roman Polanski wanted you to experience devastation, not the plight of the man.

The Pianist

LONG SHOTS

. . . show people in films from head to toe. You can make out their faces, their expressions. You can tell if they are happy, angry, afraid, or whatever. They show the setting plainly enough, but the setting is less important in long shots. People now loom as more important. Here is a long shot from the Martin Scorsese film Hugo (2011) showing a pair of young people in a train station.

Hugo

And again from Lawrence of Arabia:

Lawrence of Arabia

Walkabout

The link below is from Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). It shows how the general in the center is clearly in charge. Everyone faces him at attention. The ocean in the background figures importantly in the story. From it Yanks will launch an invasion of the island.

Letters from Iwo Jima

MEDIUM SHOTS

These characteristically frame two people from the waist up. They usually stand or sit side by side. It’s implied that the people are dramatically equal—that is, for the moment, neither dominates.

Casablanca

Hotel Rwanda

On the Waterfront

Some medium shots do indicate dramatic superiority. The still below from Vier Minuten (Four Minutes in English, 2006), a German film, shows the main character in the foreground and her guard in the background. Placement strategy now is foreground-background. The guard has had just about enough from the impudent young woman, who is a virtuoso piano player. He’s also out of focus. Subjects in the background and subjects out of focus are almost always dramatically less important than foreground subjects in focus.

Vier Minuten

Medium shots also show a bit of setting. In the image above, we can see stacks of books suggesting a library. (In fact, it’s a prison library.) The medium shot from On the Waterfront takes place in a cab. The shot from Hotel Rwanda looks like it takes place in a refugee camp.

CLOSE-UPS

Schindler, in Schindler’s List

Goeth, in Schindler’s List

Commonly, the film editor cuts back and forth between two close-ups, but that is a subject better left to my chapters on editing. The whole purpose of the CU is, as I have said, to single out, isolate. Schindler looks capable. Goeth looks next to evil. Long shots integrate—you have to take in a lot in a short period of time. CUs make you think of one thing at a time separate from other visual matters.

Here is a loose CU from Hustle & Flow (2005), a film about a pimp trying to make a hit rap song. We see the microphone plus an important gift one of his hookers gave him, a lava lamp. The actor is Terrance Howard.

Hustle & Flow

Below is a tighter close-up of a little-known actor, Arnold Lucy, who plays a rabid, super-patriotic professor in the anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). There is no room in the frame for anything but the face. The background is indistinct.

All Quiet on the Western Front

EXTREME CLOSE-UP

And finally, the extreme close-up. The most common subjects in a film to be rendered by ECUs are eyes, actually a single eye. When you fill a fifty-foot (or inch) screen with an eyeball, you mean to convey something extreme—madness or fear usually.

Psycho

That’s Janet Leigh, who never completed her shower.

Even with such minimal information, you can tell if the actor is sleepy, alarmed, or calm—maybe even dead.

Films about piano players always have ECUs of fingers on keys. Often they are stand-in fingers, as actual actors seldom know how to play the piano. The ECU below is from Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002).

The Pianist

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Here are links to two clips quite different from each other. Both illustrate simple camera setups. The first is from the fifties classic Roman Holiday (1953) and is about a princess (Audrey Hepburn) taking in the street life of Rome. She finally ends up getting her hair cut. The scene was rendered mainly with a pair of medium shots and a couple of close-ups. Try to figure out why director William Wyler used the medium shots when he did and why he used the close-ups. Here is the link:

Roman Holiday

A Place in the Sun

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946)

Normally, as I have said, the CU is reserved for one person. The exceptions are for scenes of intimacy.

Notorious

Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity

What kind of frame is this? Medium shot? Long shot? Moviegoers of 1953 had not seen much in the way of crashing waves to suggest passion. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity:

Centered medium shot of lawyer (Gregory Peck) and his client (Brock Peters) stretching to deep-focus long shot.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977)

Split screen: creative simultaneity. You can see (and hear) what is going on in Annie’s shrink’s office and in Alvy’s shrink’s office at the same time, instead of cutting back and forth. The frame from Annie Hall is not actually a true split screen, because it’s a set built to suggest two offices, to facilitate acting. Split screen technique goes back to Pillow Talk (1959) and The Thomas Crowne Affair (1968); maybe even more in more contemporary films: Mike Figgis’s Timecode (2000), Hans Canosa’s Conversations with Other Women (2005), Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (the second one, 2010). Split screens are demanding. They offer more to look at, more to take in and evaluate.

Annie Hall

The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007)

Extreme long shot taken from a rise to show the valley below. We become Josh Brolin, the man scanning the horizon. This is what I mean by the integrative nature of ELSs.

No Country for Old Men

Deep-focus MS to LS from Alex Proyas’s I, Robot (2004)

A good choice of frame and lens to show eerie mass production.

I, Robot

Composition

Composition is the functional or artful placement of subjects in the film frame. As I indicated in the last chapter, basically there are only five frames: extreme close-up, close-up, medium shot, long shot, and extreme long shot. But there are countless ways of composing within these frames. Here are some common strategies.

OVER-THE-SHOULDER

Some approaches to composition are common and are used over and over in the motion picture world. For example, the image below is called an “over-the-shoulder” shot. This is a variation of the medium shot I discussed in the last chapter: instead of having actors sit or stand next to each other in a left-right strategy suggesting dramatic equality, one is filmed face on, the other is seen only as a shoulder and the back of a head. The person facing the camera gets the dramatic emphasis. The most obvious follow-up shot is for the director to reverse the compositional strategy so that we see the face, and the expressions, of the person the camera was behind, while the other person is composed with his back to the camera. This strategy alternates dramatic emphasis.

Below is a link to a short clip from the movie Elysium (2013) about Matt Damon trying to date a nurse, filmed entirely with alternating over-the-shoulder shots.

Elysium

Most photography, still or motion picture, is taken at eye level. Now and then though the film director wants to place the camera low to shoot up at the subject or higher as on a crane or other device for elevating the camera to shoot down at the subject. Each choice has meaning. Since eye-level shots are so common, no one thinks about them much. But high-angle shots nearly always mean someone is in trouble or in some way compromised.

Psycho

You know the story. You probably know what’s going to happen to Martin Balsam for poking around.

Low-angle shots nearly always make the subject seem larger than life, in command, even menacing. Below is a shot from the Brazilian film City of God (2002), about murderous gangs in Rio.

City of God

DUTCH ANGLE

Here the camera is tilted to produce a world-out-of-kilter effect. In Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953), pickpocket Richard Widmark confronts a hooker in a shack on the waterfront.

Pickup on South Street

OVERHEAD SHOTS

These are shots taken from a camera placed directly over the subject. There is seldom a need for such shots in most films. But in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) there is considerable need as James Stewart goes all queasy when he finds himself in high places. Below is a link to a scene that contains two cutaways meant to simulate Stewart’s condition of vertigo as he forces Kim Novak to climb rickety stairs in an old California historical landmark.

Vertigo

COMPOSING WITH PROPS

Often directors utilize props to add meaning to their compositions. The still below is from The Pawnbroker (1964), Sidney Lumet’s film about a bitter Holocaust survivor who has separated himself from the world with heavy fencing.

The Pawnbroker

The shot I take you to below is from Gone with the Wind (1939). It shows Scarlett in her boudoir flanked by several mirrors so as to see her from several angles. Scarlett has several personas in the film—irresponsible before the war, a shrewd businesswoman after.

Gone with the Wind

Who would think you could show distance between a teenage girl and her parents with a mere dining room table? I mean generational distance. This still from Sam Mendez’s American Beauty (1999) economically accomplishes this.

American Beauty

Some props are more intrusive than others. You note the heavy fencing in the pawnshop and wonder what’s up. Why does a pawnshop need all that? Then it occurs to you that the prop master or the director had something else in mind beyond mere security. But the table in the Mendez film is pretty ordinary. You have to tune in to it. You glimpse that it’s a little large and people are seated formally. You think about the film as a whole. Yes, the girl is isolated. Why not use space and a prop to convey this?

Here is another still from Hustle & Flow, during the early going when the pimp and his people are actually making the song. The prop is an ordinary fan. Director Craig Brewer had a good reason for placing it alongside Nola, the hooker, in effect making her and the prop equal. The fan gives Nola the chance to be something special, to participate. Nola can’t sing or make music, but she can turn a fan on and off—on when the group isn’t recording, off when it is. The setting is hot Memphis. At last Nola (Taryn Manning) has something meaningful to do. The scene gets to you for its simplicity and what the fan job means to Nola.

Hustle & Flow

F.G./B.G.

Citizen Kane

The young Orson Welles, who directed Citizen Kane, was playing a visual trick on viewers. The room you see is the living room of the Kanes’s mansion—but it is ridiculously large in order to suggest the emotional distance between Kane, barely seen in focus in the extreme background, and Susan, his wife, also in focus, in the foreground.

In the frame below from The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), a soldier has just returned home from service in WWII. He greets his two children but wants to surprise his wife, in fairly sharp focus in the b.g.

The Best Years of Our Lives

Gregg Toland shot The Best Years. He also shot Citizen Kane and was partial to deep-focus photography. Here is another shot from Citizen Kane in which Kane occupies the f.g., Leland (Joseph Cotten) the midground, and a third character, Bernstein (Everett Sloane) in the b.g.—all in focus.

Citizen Kane

FUZZED-OUT BACKGROUNDS

Here are two stills from movies that don’t try to keep f.g. and b.g. in focus, for good reasons. Both were shot with telephoto lenses. The first is from a film called Maria Full of Grace (2004), directed by Joshua Marston. You can’t make anything out in the b.g. The second is from Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986). The b.g. is fuzzed out in this shot too.

Maria Full of Grace

Platoon

OTHER APPROACHES TO COMPOSITION

Sometimes narrative circumstances combine to call naturally for compositions that are soft, lyrical, and sometimes indistinct, beckoning interpretation. It depends on the story, the preferences of the director and her cinematographer. It might also depend on where we are, not only the setting but the moment. Here are three films with (at least occasional) soft composition.

Many art films feature lyrical composition. Below is a still from House of Sand, a Brazilian film of 2005.

House of Sand

Surreal composition from Inception (2010)

Here is a deep-focus shot that emphasizes perspective, or the sense of distance. From the Wim Wenders masterpiece:

Wings of Desire (1987)

That’s actually the old Berlin Wall on the left. Had Wenders used a longer lens (more telephoto), the sidewalk would not have converged so sharply, and the wall would seem just about as tall in the b.g. as in the f.g. But Wenders liked this wide-angle look.

Saving Private Ryan (1998):

ARTFUL COMPOSITION

Cinematographers are artists in their own right who often can’t resist composing for the sake of art. They go for innately appealing frames, if their directors will let them. Or the directors themselves have a strong artistic sense and order certain visual elements. It’s hard to know. What might be artful to me could be functional to someone else. Or the reverse. Anyway, I am taking the liberty of showing you a few shots I call intrinsically artful.

Spoof on technology from Brazil (1985):

Child with sparklers in Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012):

Visual artists are often partial to diagonal lines. Many believe they convey strength. Even pop films like Rocky (1976) benefit from artful diagonals. In the shot below, Rocky’s strength is enhanced not only by the low angle of the composition but also by the diagonal parallelism of the ropes and Rocky’s arm. Bam!

Rocky

Here is a shot with strong diagonals from Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954). It shows farmers lined up close-packed awaiting marauding bandits. The spears have an appealing lower-left to upper-right composition.

The Seven Samurai

Zorba the Greek

SYMMETRY

Below is a shot based on the compositional strategy of symmetry. It’s from a Chinese film called Raise the Red Lantern (1991), directed by Zhang Yimou.

Raise the Red Lantern

Zhang had a good reason for composing some of his shots symmetrically. The film is about a concubine house with heavy, heavy rules. If you did not obey, you might be executed. The symmetrical shots suggest rigidity, formality.

The Third Man clip:

Movement

Movies move. Images on the screen move. Actors move and cameras move. Movement was why movies got started back around 1895 in the first place. People had seen plenty of still photos. Nothing about them moved. Movement was a novel development in visual communication and ensured, finally, the success of the movie industry worldwide.

PERSISTENCE OF VISION

Human vision contributes to the experience of taking in a movie. A phenomenon known as persistence of vision, which all humans are endowed with, produces a brief after-image. You know this best as a lingering bright light you see for a split second after a flash photo of you is taken. Though each movie frame is slightly different from the one before, the eyes (and the brain) carry the action over and create in you the illusion of smooth motion. If Martians lacked persistence of vision and tried to watch an Earth movie, they would see only a jittery, annoying succession of still images, and not “movies.”

Movies move in many ways. Here are some common movements of subjects:

   Toward a stationary camera and past it

   Toward a moving camera which keeps pace with the subject

   Away from a stationary camera; subject appears smaller

   Away from a camera that follows, laterally or frontally; subject does not change in size

   Minor movement—lifting a cup of coffee, turning a head, the camera sometimes following

   Random movement—two boxers in a ring

And here are some ways the camera moves:

   Tracking shots. The camera is mounted on a device that has wheels and moves on tracks. Just about every film made today uses dozens of dolly shots.

   Handheld shots. An experienced camera operator walks around with a lightweight camera. If absolute smoothness is desired, the operator uses a device called a Steadicam, which incorporates a gyroscope so the operator can walk with the camera and get footage that looks as silky as tracking shots. Steadicam shots are employed when terrain or architecture does not allow for laying dolly tracks. Sometimes, though, smoothness is not desired, so the operator just hoists the camera onto his shoulder and shoots, maybe even jerking the camera a little.

   Crane shots. The camera is mounted on an actual crane or “movie bird.” Crane shots are very dramatic. They might start at eye level, then sweep up over houses and trees. Films often begin or end with crane shots.

   Pans and tilts. The camera is mounted on a rigid device, such as a tripod, and the operator rotates the camera left to right or tilts it up and down.

   Zooming shots. These optical effects enlarge or reduce the subject and they do it gradually. Zooming in narrows background; zooming out widens it.

AN ALBUM OF FILM MOVEMENT

Boxing as dance

From City Lights (1931). (Actually this fight does turn into a kind of ballet.)

City Lights

. . . and right into the fog of war. From:

Jarhead (2007)

Incredible Arctic running

From The Fast Runner (2001). This film was made entirely by Inuits—cast and crew. It features a ten-minute chase during which a despised man flees other Inuits who want to kill him. The chase crosses a snowy, slushy Arctic landscape. The pursued man is naked, and his ding dong swings about. YouTube used to show the entire sequence, but it must have gotten a lot of complaints because it now makes you verify your age and jump through other hoops. I did happen to find a two-minute version of the running on YouTube, which you may access with the link below. I don’t know why YouTube feels that a two-minute version of a swinging ding dong is acceptable but a 10-minute version is not.

The Fast Runner

From Run Lola Run (1998). In this German film, Lola runs to save her man from the German mob. Director Tom Tykwer and editor Mathilde Bonnefoy play with the old Einsteinium concept of space-time collisions, some of which you can see in the trailer linked below:

Run Lola Run

This is the classic troubled-cop film from the sixties. It features the granddaddy of all wild car chases—one of them, anyway. The star is Steve McQueen.

Bullitt

The long take has become a kind of in-joke among knowing directors, film professors and critics, and savvy viewers. If you are such a person you might watch a film with a less sophisticated friend and exclaim, “Did you see that? It was all one take!” He might go, “Shut up.” Still, you will want to press “<<” and see the shot again, if your friend lets you.

For my money, no other type of motion picture photography has the potential to be so artistic as the long take. It’s a special art form. Remember Ricky Fitts in American Beauty (1999), the young man who was fond of filming plastic bags fluttering in the breeze? We might call him an artist of abstract motion. In the film he says, “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in.”

Filmmakers like Orson Welles weren’t after abstraction, but you can get into pure abstract motion by blocking story from your mind for a time and instead tuning into things that move. Here is a link to Steven Spielberg’s first film, called Duel (1971). Dennis Weaver has just been threatened by a mysterious truck. The camera follows him into a restroom and then out again.

Duel

Wings of Desire

Lighting

All film needs light. You can’t shoot on a stormy night in a farmhouse without power. You can’t a take a shot of two people in a car at night without some kind of simulated dashboard light, bright enough to see faces. Viewers have to see what is going on even if it isn’t clear where the source of light is coming from.

There are many ways to light a scene. Big-budget films have entire lighting crews headed up by the director of photography (DP or cinematographer) and his assorted technicians and grips. One of the pleasures of movie watching is to study the lighting—its strategy, its purpose. From what direction does the light come? Is it sharp? Intense? Diffuse?

THE SUN

The most fundamental source of light for many kinds of photography is the sun. It doesn’t demand a crew to utilize it. It’s up there shining away for half of the day. About all you have to do is pay attention to its position. You get different photographic effects by shooting away from the sun or toward it, or if the sun is low or high in the sky.

Here is a shot from the famous indie film Easy Rider (1969). The sun was the sole source of light for this bit of action. (Note: only one shadow.) It is located to the left of the frame at approximately right angles to the subjects, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. (Jack Nicholson too is seen behind Fonda.) László Kovács shot the film. To maximize the sun, Kovács had a few decisions to make, like what time of the day to shoot and in what direction the trio would be riding. Even outlaw films like Easy Rider require some thinking through.

Easy Rider

LIGHT REFLECTORS

Obviously Kovács could do nothing to control the light of the sun. An assistant could not run along beside the motorcycles with a reflector. But most outdoor shoots do employ a number of reflectors and other devices for controlling the sunlight. Do a Google search for “light reflectors for photography” to see a variety.

SHOOTING TOWARD THE SUN

. . . may produce some interesting shadows and darkened faces all the way to silhouettes. Here is a shot in which the camera was turned toward the sun. From the Macedonian-British film called Before the Rain (1994):

The shadows point to the sun in Before the Rain.

THE MAGIC HOUR

Here is an example of the interplay of these three kinds of lights in a medium shot from The Ghost Writer (2010). All three lights were placed out of frame. The key light is located to the right. Notice how it brightly illuminates the left sides of Kim Cattrall’s and Ewan McGregor’s faces. The fill light comes from the left and forward and provides enough light, though less than the key, to keep Kim’s arm and the right side of both actors’ faces from going too dark. The back light keeps the backdrop from going dark, though it is out of focus. The result is lighting in depth. Kim’s arm is modeled fetchingly round, not flat. This film was lit and shot by Pawel Edelman.

The Ghost Writer

Here is a three-point shot from Stand by Me (1986):

Stand by Me

Three-point lighting schematic

LIGHTING A SCENE

Waitress

Implied window at right lights left side of Michael Douglas’s face and falls directly on Glenn Close (left) but leaves Anne Archer’s face muted. From:

Fatal Attraction (1987)

Below, strong side lighting with lights set low. This is a concert hall. The performer’s head is rim lit. Very little fill light is on the performer or audience. From:

Vier Minuten (Four Minutes) (2006)

More Venetian-blind lighting, from Blade Runner (1982). You’d think that in Harrison Ford’s futuristic world they’d think of other ways of controlling outside light. But no, DP Jordan Kronenweth couldn’t resist.

Blade Runner

Window light blasts through in the shot below from The Upside of Anger (2005). The camera might easily have been pointed at the wall behind Kevin Costner to simplify lighting. It takes a lot of time and effort to throw light through a window—even a simulated window—and produce those rays. Director Mike Binder must have thought he could say something about these two self-indulgent characters with the strong window light. (The other character is Joan Allen.) The cinematographer was Richard Greatrex.

The Upside of Anger

Nor could Steven Spielberg resist shooting toward this window in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). With some filters and scrims, and maybe some fiddling with a computer, Spielberg came up with a hazy effect to match the hazy moral issues of the film. Shot by Janusz Kaminski.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Night shooting

If possible, when shooting at night, photographers like to go with natural lights—lighted storefronts, electric signs, streetlights. Example:

Jack Reacher

Nice puddles.

Meanwhile compare these natural-looking shots with the one from the horror film I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), below. Obviously lights were used off-camera left. You know it’s supposed to be a night shot because of the darkness at the top of the frame and the car light. DP: Denis Crossan.

I Know What You Did Last Summer

This is a photographic term having to do with actually shooting in the daytime but darkening the image to simulate night. The image link below was shot in broad daylight but has been made night-like by underexposure. What you might take as the moon was really the sun.

Photograph by H. David Stein

This has to do with the ratio of lights to darks in the film image. High-key lighting has lots of normally exposed areas; low-key lighting is shadowy—in fact, mainly black. The shot below is from The Night of the Hunter (1955).

The Night of the Hunter

This image shows an example of low-key lighting, which is often accomplished with a single light that emphasizes the contours of the subject.

Contrast has to do with the ratio between whites and blacks. Here are two pictures of the same famous actor. One is high contrast and the other is low contrast.

LIGHTING AND MEANING

Light is seldom neutral. As we’ve seen, the absence of a lit backdrop in the frame from Stand by Me makes the shot a little ominous. Shadowless light too has power to communicate. The shot below, set in the Washington Post newsroom, is from All the President’s Men (1976). The flat, even light on reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein implies wrongdoing will eventually be illuminated by the journalists.

All the President’s Men

All the President’s Men

The Good German (2006)

Photography by the film’s director, Stephen Soderbergh.

Imaging

The world needed two things to get started making movies. First, it needed a photographic base to leap from. Second, it needed new technology to create the illusion of motion.

The photographic forerunner to movies was still photography, up and running worldwide by the mid-nineteenth century. Photography is about chemicals changing as light strikes them. When applied to a medium—glass, paper, film—the chemicals don’t just change randomly. A lens organizes the image and focuses it. Thus to take still pictures you need light cast on a subject, chemicals coated on a medium, and a lens. You also need a light-tight box for the film.

EARLY STILL PHOTOGRAPHY

. . . was monochromatic, commonly called black and white. Think of a silver spoon that turns black if left out in the sun or in a window. The longer the spoon is exposed to light, the more tarnished it becomes. But it won’t register any kind of image because (usually) no lens organizes the light falling on it. Early photographers discovered that silver oxide was the best compound for taking still pictures. They mixed the silver oxide with gelatin and spread it on glass plates.

I’ve oversimplified here. The first exposure of the film produces a negative. The darker the subject (or elements of the subject) the less light reached the negative. So those elements turned out light on the stock. Brighter subjects burned dark. When a positive print is made, the light elements turned out darker, the darker brighter.

THE MOTION PICTURE CHALLENGE

The challenge for inventors of motion picture photography a half-century later was to develop chemicals that would register an image much faster than the emulsion Brady and his contemporaries used. Pioneers like Edison in the United States and the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, in France succeeded in developing emulsions so “fast” that shutter speed (exposure time) could be cut to ₁∕₄₈ of a second, sufficient to capture motion without blurring.

PERSISTENCE OF VISION

Monochromatic moviemaking held sway for nearly fifty years. Above is a still from the famous D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915. Note the production advancements: larger cast, high angle photography, much motion.

ALTERING BLACK AND WHITE

Both black and white and color film can be altered for various dramatic and artistic effects. For example, I altered the b&w shot below from Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) to be less contrast-y in the first instance and more in the third. I did this with the simple picture editor that comes with Microsoft Word.

Pi

MORE TYPICAL B&W

. . . is exhibited in this shot from The Last Picture Show (1971), which displays a continuous range of tones from near whites, through grays, to blacks.

The Last Picture Show

For a clip from The Last Picture Show (1971), a supremely great film, go to the link below.

The Last Picture Show

TECHNICOLOR

True color photography was a matter of coating strips of film with three color gels, one strip each for the primary colors red, blue, and green. When light hit the strips the color exploded—instantly and harmlessly. Early Hollywood-style color films were dominated by Technicolor, a corporation which loaded special cameras with the three color strips and mixed color in post-production at a lab. As you can imagine, these cameras were bulky. Fluid, moving-camera cinematography suffered. Some famous Technicolor films: The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, The Greatest Show on Earth, Bambi, Dumbo, Broken Arrow, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, Jungle Book, The Last Time I Saw Paris, The Quiet Man, Singin’ in the Rain, Three Sailors and a Girl.

We tend to associate Technicolor with high-saturation color films; however, bright, punchy films were probably more a result of preferences of the times than the product of the Technicolor system. Two developments worked to simplify shooting in color and tone it down. First, moviegoers gradually gave up their preference for high-saturation color—though they never had a chance to think about it because Hollywood seldom showed them subdued or low-saturation product. (The same kind of thinking dominated early color TV; the networks thought audiences would prefer programs dripping with color.) But by the 1970s film directors and their cinematographers were producing films with down-toned color, for a variety of aesthetic reasons, and audiences did not object. They hardly thought about it at all. Some viewers might even have appreciated the subtlety low-saturation color films could deliver.

Second, companies like Eastman Kodak were able to coat a single ribbon of film with emulsions of the three primary colors so that color mixing took place in the camera, instantly, upon exposure—and not at a lab. The industry went big for Eastman Kodak’s color and its relatives, and bulky Technicolor went into decline. Cameras became smaller and more mobile and studios could outright buy them—the Technicolor corporations made studios rent their cameras.

Thus shooting in color became routine by 1970. Peter Bogdanovich, who made The Last Picture Show, had to plead with Columbia to let him shoot in b&w. He thought he could capture the soul of the little dead-end Texas town where the film is set better in b&w. When Hal Ashby wanted to shoot the dustbowl-set Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory (1976) in b&w, United Artists said no. So director Ashby instead had his cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, shoot with a woman’s stocking stretched around the lens to diffuse the color.

A GALLERY OF SHOTS FROM LOW-SATURATION COLOR FILMS

The Grammar of Editing

Look at the 37-second clip below of a famous scene from a famous film.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

So now we enter the realm of film grammar, which implies rules editors pretty much have to follow. “Grammar” also suggests basic communication. The grammar of editing is like this: people who know editing will think you are a rube if you don’t follow some basic rules of editing grammar. You will probably never be a film editor, but your film viewing will be enhanced by knowing about the grammar of editing.

Here are six commonly used conventions of film grammar.

   Parallel shooting

   Match cutting

   Jump cuts

   Crosscutting

   Point-of-view sequences

   Cutaways

   Cut-ins

The brief sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark displays the first two of these editing conventions and hints at another.

PARALLEL SHOOTING

This has to do with following a shot you have taken with a shot of similar or identical frame or composition. Spielberg and Slocombe did this twice for the dumb sword guy sequence, in shots 3 and 4 and shots 5 and 6. It just makes sense to follow an over-the-shoulder shot toward the sword guy with another over-the-shoulder shot toward Ford. Also, if Slocombe took a medium shot of the foolish sword guy posturing, it makes sense to take a medium shot of Ford briefly considering what to do. Parallel shooting is one way filmmakers and their editors build coherence, continuity, and grace into their efforts.

This is harder to explain than to see. It has to do with making sure the action of one shot takes up at the exact moment when the action of the last shot left off. Thus the action is smooth and continuous across the cut. The shots are said to “match.” Kahn did two match cuts, for shots 3 and 4 and shots 6 and 7. In 3 and 4, either Spielberg or his continuity person had to make sure both Ford and the sword guy were standing the same way for the two shots. Ford could not have his hands on his hips in one shot and hanging at his side in the next. The result would be jarring and viewers would notice—what is called a discontinuity or jump cut. Ford whips out his revolver at the end of shot 6. Kahn cut 7 to match the action of shot 6 carrying over to 7. If Kahn had cut 7 too short or too long, the result would be . . .

JUMP CUTS

This is when action does not match across the cut. If the action had been cut too short there would be a visible discontinuity, a “jump”; if too long, the action would have been unnaturally and annoyingly prolonged. In both cases the cuts would call attention to themselves. But matched, they call no attention to themselves. Most editors want their handiwork to be invisible, or nearly so. Not always but most of the time.

Here is a clip from Hunger Games (2013), which has many match cuts, especially when Jennifer Lawrence is sawing the tree limb.

Hunger Games

Unforgiven

The clip from Hunger Games I took you to above opens with editor Christopher S. Capp (and two others) working in a few quick POV sequences to show Katniss looking around the forest.

CUTAWAYS

These are shots of people just off the main line of action. I’ve already mentioned several in the clip from Unforgiven—the bar drones, the prostitutes. Their facial expressions help you interpret the main action. They look plainly worried, even frightened. If they had looked blasé, the scene would have a much different feel.

CUT-INS

. . . are brief shots of small objects—a pocket watch, a wad of money on a table, a pistol kicked into a corner of a room. The editor then cuts them into the principle scene as needed. Cut-ins are usually taken by a second-unit crew while the main personnel are not even present. In the pessimistic Western High Noon (1952), some thugs just let out of prison are returning to the prairie community of Hadleyville bent on killing a few people in town who helped put them away. The main avenger will arrive on the noon train; thus, time is important. Will Kane (Gary Cooper), the marshal, keeps looking at his pocket watch, photographed long before or after the shots of Kane pulling out his watch and looking at it. High Noon was edited by Elmo Williams.

In the video below there are several cut-ins of one of those old-fashioned bomb detonators with plungers you push down. The film is The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which takes place in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp near an important river during WWII. The British prisoners have built a bridge, but British commandos have secretly wired it to blow up. Officer Nicholson (Alec Guinness) takes an engineer’s pride in what his men have wrought and doesn’t want to blow it up.

Bridge on the River Quai

movieclips.com/pXkuw-the-bridge-on-the-river-kwai-movie-what-have-i-done/

Tim Dirks, film critic, loves to make lists of films—the best cinematography, the best acting, and so on. He has a website called Tim Dirks’ Best Film Editing Sequences. Maybe you can’t see all the films on Dirks’ list. Still, it’s a good guide for future viewing. The bridge blow-up made number 16 on his list.

Dirks’ best edited sequences:

Editing Sound and Image

You not only see a movie, you hear it, too. Many directors employ one person, or a person who heads a team, for editing both sight and sound. Bigger films will have separate image-editing teams and separate sound-editing teams. Pairing sound with image is itself an art form—there are so many intriguing possibilities. A quick, gruesome example: A bad guy points a gun at a victim. Must we both see and hear him fire the shot? Why not cut away to a more meaningful image, such as the victim or someone nearby, as the sound of the gun is heard off-camera? To have the visual repeat the aural, or vice-versa, is usually redundant. But to hear one thing and see something more meaningful creates editorial art.

DIALOGUE EDITED WITH IMAGE

Below is a link to a famous scene from another famous film. It’s Father Barry’s impassioned sermon in On the Waterfront (1954) to troubled stevedores in the hold of a ship. Barry wants the men to stand up to the murderous union that controls their lives. He is played by Karl Malden.

Note the use of cutaways to the stevedores, to the union goons, and especially to Marlin Brando who is trying to decide if he should testify against the union at the crime hearings. The link:

On the Waterfront

Here is a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Paths of Glory (1957). The scene is set during WWI trench warfare and consists mainly of three long-running moving-camera shots: a dolly shot down the trench where soldiers are awaiting orders to go “over the top”: another moving-camera shot, this time a reverse angle shot of the first that shows Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) walking swiftly down the trench and cursorily inspecting his troops; and a third moving-camera shot which tracks along with the advancing soldiers for a very long distance. Link:

Paths of Glory

Now we go to a great opera of sound and picture editing. It’s the invasion scene in Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Coppola in 1979. Click on the link below for an eighteen-minute version of this scene which includes coverage of hundreds of explosions and colored smoke bombs, shots of choppers aloft coming out of the clouds, shots inside the choppers, shots of the beach, shots of villagers running in panic. We see trucks blown off bridges, shacks exploding, peasants gunned down and falling. We see and hear US soldiers talking about surfing on the village’s wonderful beach. Surfboards are brought out within minutes of the invasion’s conclusion. We see proud, erect, fearless Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who loves it all and is unfazed by nearby explosions and who says things like, “I love the smell of napalm. It smells like . . . victory,” and Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen), who looks morally conflicted by all the destruction and carnage. Kilgore orders the playing of martial, demonic music from Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries through speakers mounted on the choppers. Note that as location changes, the music changes in aural perspective; as I have said, the train whistle in High Noon did not.

The entire sequence amounts to one of the greatest anti-war statements in filmdom. As you watch and listen to the clip, keep track of how sound and image pair up to produce something greater than just frightful images and loud sounds. They produce a third thing: revulsion.

Apocalypse Now

Editing Space and Time

All films deal with some kind of space that has to be understood by viewers. Unless it pans, the camera can point in only one direction at a time. It usually can’t cover all of the space in one shot, so the director orders several shots—left, right, center; east, west, north, south. This amounts to a lot of footage. It’s the editor’s job to sort through all this material and present space in a swift and coherent way. Directionality is super important in movie plots where space might mean life or death. No, don’t go there. The killer is behind that barn!

It’s the same with time. Directors always order up more footage than their editors can possibly use. It’s not unusual for a director to shoot ten to one or even a hundred to one—meaning, only one foot in ten or a hundred will make it into the finished film. The editor faces a lot of decisions having to do with passing time. Ought time pass slowly? Fast? Might it be stretched out? What kind of film is it? Lyrical and leisurely? Rapid fire with lots of movement? The editor has to meet with her director to get straight on these matters.

ESTABLISHING SHOTS AND THE CLASSIC SEQUENCE

Below is a link to a three-minute clip from The African Queen, directed by John Huston in 1951. It has to do with an aging couple, played by Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, floating down an African river during WWI. He is a riverboat captain who drinks too much, she a proper Christian missionary. They are bound for a German-controlled lake where they hope to sabotage a large German warship. They approach rapids. The woman looks forward to being tossed around by the white water.

The African Queen

USING FOREGROUND/BACKGROUND STRATEGIES FOR MAKING SPACE CLEAR

This is a common, much-honored editorial method for presenting space. The director simply composes in depth, placing one subject in the f.g. and the other in the b.g. It doesn’t have to be a long-running shot, just a few seconds, to show how far away two (or more) people are. Here is short clip from another John Huston classic, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), when bandits confront an American prospector, played by Humphrey Bogart again. It’s the famous “We ain’t got no stinkin’ badges” scene. The integrative f.g./b.g. shot comes late in the scene.

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Charlie Wilson’s War

Here is a short video from Quantum of Solace—my nomination for the most forgettable movie title of 2008. This is a James Bond flick starring the ever-capable Daniel Craig. In the scene linked below, Craig beats up four thugs in a mere twenty-five seconds.

Quantum of Solace

That scene is not available on YouTube, so in compensation I am taking you to another scene in the movie. The following link delivers you to the famous train-and-bus wreck by which Ford escapes.

The Fugitive

The only film I know that is absolutely in real time, in every scene, is the experimental production by Mike Figgis called Timecode (2000). This is because it’s one uncut take from beginning to end. Actually, it’s four related single-takes, each running ninety-seven minutes and playing simultaneously in their own quadrant on the screen. It’s a viewing experience like no other. The story: Hollywood goings on, raising money, having sex in limousines, making deals, outsmarting people. Link to a trailer:

Timecode

The Art of Editing

This chapter amounts to a tour of some of the most artful and compelling edited sequences in film history. Many people feel that editing should be “invisible,” felt but not seen. Edited sequences should roll along seamlessly and lucidly. But editing that is meant to be artful often does indeed call attention to itself. You quickly realize you are in something special, something aesthetic, and you are compelled to look, note, and maybe marvel, according to your film aesthetic.

Often it is during scenes of violence that editors get a chance to strut their stuff. Violence compels movement, changes in location, confusion, extreme states of mind—the ingredients of creative editing. Thus most of the scenes I discuss below are based on violence. It’s harder to detect art in quieter scenes.

The Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin (1925)

First, we go back to 1925 and a Soviet-era film by Sergei Eisenstein called Battleship Potemkin. It is set in 1905 when the crew of the battleship Potemkin rebelled against their Tsarist officers. In all, the film is meant to serve as a precursor to the wider Russian Revolution of 1917.

Eisenstein was a scholar of film technique. He was interested in how editing might produce strong emotions and ideas in viewers largely by the cut, and by the sequence of images. This technique had been called montage, from the French to put together. The most famous montage in Potemkin is the Odessa Steps sequence in which Tsarist soldiers shot down many civilians after the Potemkin sailed into Odessa Harbor and incited residents to rebellion. Here it is:

This scene is far simpler than the Odessa Steps sequence. Art is found both in complexity and in simplicity. Wise was helped by props (the tables) and costuming. A second-unit crew had to produce the zip pans. Even back in 1941 when the film came out, viewers knew that a zip pan meant a passing of time.

Editing within the shot from 12 Angry Men (1957)

Even simpler than Welles’s breakfast scene is a scene from Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men. Twelve male jurors have been sequestered on a hot day to decide the fate of a teenager who has been accused of killing his father. One juror gives a speech full of bigotry about the irresponsibility of young people. He grows angry and ugly, so much so that the other jurors get up and turn their backs on him. Then Henry Fonda makes a speech about tolerance. Here is the link.

12 Angry Men

The shower scene from Psycho (1960)

Doubtless you’ve seen this scene many times. This time allow me to take it apart from the standpoint of an artful piece of editing—shooting and editing. There are actually several jump cuts or discontinuities in the sequence of shots. I think Hitchcock ordered editor George Tomasini to leave them in. They make the editing itself a bit frenzied and unnatural, like the act of murder. I have read that Hitchcock had a special shower with removable walls built so he could film from all angles. This allowed varied and actually jittery coverage from multiple perspectives. Such a disturbing scene deserves jittery. Art sometimes must be jittery, especially when it deals with craziness.

Psycho

The gunning-down scene from Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

This is the climax of the 1967 version of Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn. The film was made during a period of innovation in American cinema. Penn and his editor Dede Allen were actually taken by European styles of editing. Bonnie and Clyde drive down a country road. The actual gunning down may be like no other piece of editing you have ever seen. Moments before the shooting, the scene plays fast with lots of brief shots of heads turning and changes of expression from love to fear. During the shooting, Penn employed slow-motion photography and had Allen overlap some shots to stretch out the executions. The hail of bullets from the law guys in the bushes lasts about half a minute—believe me, it’s a long half-minute—and Bonnie and Clyde twitch and recoil with every slug they take. As critic Pauline Kael said about this scene, “It puts the sting back into death”—since for decades shootings in movies had been fast, simple, and bloodless, to satisfy code people.

Notice that one cut to Bonnie is a few frames longer than surrounding clips. She gazes at Clyde. The shot says, “Good-bye, my love.” She knows this is it. It’s amazing what leaving two frames at the tail of a shot—one twelfth of a second—can accomplish. The clip:

Bonnie and Clyde

The Sting

Hollywood Style

There is a famous, maybe apocryphal, story about an early use of the close-up. Someone in a theatre, alarmed at an image showing only head and shoulders, stood up and shouted, “Show us his feet!” Maybe other people felt the same way. Moviegoers at that time weren’t quite ready for the close-up. But it just took a few short years for (a) nearly all film directors to employ close-ups and (b) for audiences to accept them. Soon no one leapt to his feet, alarmed at a big face on the screen. Close-ups differentiated movies from plays. Close-ups really do jar and they are not invisible. Yet we quickly accepted them.

Close-ups were inserted into movies for two reasons. First, the story unfolding on the screen demanded that, now and then, characters had to be isolated, set apart from other characters and from events. To insert a close-up accomplished this. For a few seconds you are invited to consider the plight or the mind-frame of one character above others. Second, close-ups were big enough to convey inner states—fear, joy, anger, confidence, affection. If a character was lost amid five or six other characters, say in a long shot, your attention would not have been drawn to individual characters.

Moviegoers might have been confused by close-ups of characters in the early days of moviemaking, but directors went ahead with them anyway; they were simply indispensable.

Media guru Marshall McLuhan wrote about unsophisticated Africans who had never seen movies before. When showed UN educational movies meant to urge villagers to throw out standing water, they were in fear when someone walked off the screen. They thought the person had disappeared or was abducted by an evil god. Some in the audience got up and looked behind the screen. These people had not been exposed to standard filmmaking techniques. Walking off screen is a staple of Hollywood style. Sophisticated viewers do not panic when someone does that in a movie. When shown a film that cut from an extreme long shot of a house that looked very small, to a long shot, these African viewers gasped. They thought the house had magically grown in size.

This man is generally credited with doing more to develop Hollywood style than anybody else. It’s not an exaggeration to say he literally invented Hollywood technique as we know it today. He was one of the first to employ:

(Birth of a Nation is about the Civil War and is frankly critical of the North for winning. It depicts freed slaves as rapists of white women and glorifies the Klan. Too bad. These unfortunate turns of plot and bigoted attitudes have deflected many people from seeing the cinematic advances of the film. Content is one thing, technique another.)

Here is a trailer for:

Birth of a Nation

Speeding up time for one sequence while slowing it down for another was a rather novel technique in 1915. But not today. It’s a standard element of Hollywood style. Viewers understood, then as now.

A COMPENDIUM OF HOLLYWOOD STYLE THROUGH THE DECADES

I can’t list all the features of classic Hollywood style. Instead, here are a few well-known films, which, though very different from each other, are founded on Hollywood style.

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)

Though this film, directed by Mervyn LeRoy at the dawn of the sound film era, was far out of the mainstream of popular moviemaking, it obediently honored Hollywood style. It’s about a man wrongly convicted of committing robbery and murder and serving time on a chain gang laying railroad tracks. I believe the film got made because people saw it as a metaphor for the Great Depression, namely, the unfairness of the apparently failed economic system that had screwed over the whole country.

Below is a link to a six-minute clip with numerous examples of Hollywood style. See if you pick out:

   Cutaways

   Point-of-view sequences

   Uirectional continuity

   Variety of frames—close-ups, long shots, etc.

   Match cuts

Forget the music. It’s way unoriginal.

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang

It’s a Wonderful Life

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

But Hollywood wasn’t all clichés and nonsense. Just when you were about to give up on ever seeing anything original, something fresh turns up—like David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. There hadn’t been many films set in the desert until this movie came out and made Peter O’Toole famous. And Lean made it absolutely beautiful.

Below is a link to a scene I call Bedouin Rescue, though YouTube calls it something else. It’s gorgeous in its sparse horizontality. It’s also 70mm widescreen, rather novel in 1962. But it’s still standard Hollywood style. Lawrence has ventured out of his camp to find a Bedouin who has fallen off his camel and trudges across the desert parched and near death. His servant boy keeps watch, scanning the minimalist horizon for any sign of Lawrence. A series of POV shots unreels. The music swells. The boy keeps his eyes on the horizon and spots something we can’t really see. The boy is excited and urges his camel forward into a trot, always right to left. Then the film cuts to Lawrence on his camel with the Bedouin hanging on to him from behind. Lawrence’s camel trots left to right. Good ol’ fashioned directional continuity.

Lawrence of Arabia

Independent Styles Before 1960

There have always been filmmakers who longed to break out of established traditions of making movies. They wanted to photograph, edit, or add sound in new ways. Often they wanted to bring innovation to storytelling or tell stories about offbeat subjects. They rebelled in degrees. Some arm wrestled studio heads (and always lost) to show a man and a woman horizontal on a bed, or to tell a story about evil not being vanquished in the end. Some just threw up their hands and started their own studios. Others didn’t work in studios at all; they just took their little casts down to Coney Island and made movies totally out of the mainstream on the sly and with the slimmest of budgets.

This chapter takes a look at independent filmmaking before 1960; the following chapter surveys some major independents who worked after 1960. The focus of both this chapter and the next is on US filmmaking, while the two chapters that follow those are about novel approaches to filmmaking in foreign lands. Collectively, these filmmakers have created an impressive body of work. Many of their experiments with sight, sound, and storytelling have even found their way into mainstream filmmaking.

But the point here is purpose. Indies frankly aspire to something like art or literature; Hollywood aims at mere entertainment or exploitation—though I must admit the line is fuzzy.

Independent means one of two things, and often both. It means filmmakers were free to concoct their own stories and direct it their way, and it means making movies off-Hollywood, beyond the reach of the profit-driven studios, though many independents did in fact work for studios. They made the studios so much money they could work their will on them.

As for style, Hollywood, or old style, persisted. It persisted because it worked. It got the job done. It told stories cleanly. One way to think of new style is as a cake of old style with a thick, tangy icing of experimentation, enough for viewers to feel that they had seen something truly different.

Silent-era indies

Two great directors of the silent era were Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. At the height of their popularity, both had 100 percent control of scripting, shooting, and editing. Each then stamped every film they made with their unique personalities and takes on life.

Chaplin

We remember Charlie as the nimble, quick-witted tramp figure with a giving and positive nature. The whole world took Chaplin to its heart. He made so much money he was able to set up his own studio, and he wrote, directed, and edited all of his films after 1914. He even composed music for them. He was one of the first true “indies.”

Moviegoers loved Chaplin because they could identify with him. He was footloose though always close to financial ruin, a guy who improvised to get by in an era before welfare and shelters for the homeless.

In The Gold Rush (1925), he and his prospecting partner are faced with starvation in an Alaskan winter. How do you create humor from starvation? Chaplin improvises by boiling a shoe for their Thanksgiving dinner. Neither the narration nor the music in the clip below is authentic:

Thanksgiving dinner in The Gold Rush:

I mentioned this man in the last chapter as a practitioner of a venerated Hollywood technique, the two-shot. Now I want to call attention to seven sterling comedies he made from 1939 to 1944 (among many other movies before and after).

This man was a Hollywood whirlwind. What made Sturges an independent? Two things. First, he was allowed to both write and direct, not a common thing during this period when the rigid studio system was based on a strict division of labor. And second, Sturges’s subject matter was far more satirical and biting than anything Hollywood was turning out during WWII when the tendency was to play it safe. In The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), a pretty young woman is so sexed up she goes to a series of parties held for servicemen about to be shipped overseas. She marries a private and gets pregnant by him, but is so drunk she can’t remember anything about him—or it. (Actually the movie shows her getting bumped on the head as the cause of her amnesia, but nobody believes that.) This girl, played by Betty Hutton, goes by the improbable name of Trudy Kockenlocker. Below is a link to a clip from the movie showing the succession of (pretty wild) parties.

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

Meshes of the Afternoon . . . is a short experimental film directed by wife and husband team, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. The film’s narrative is circular, and repeats a number of psychologically symbolic images, including a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper–like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook and an ocean. Through creative editing, distinct camera angles, and slow motion, the surrealist film depicts a world in which it is more and more difficult to catch reality.

You can see the 13-minute Meshes of the Afternoon in its entirety by clicking below:

Meshes of the Afernoon

Nicholas Ray

. . . was a Hollywood director who made several films about disaffected youth: They Live by Night (1949) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). This was during an era of sweet films about young people, with Mickey Rooney in Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble (1944) and Summer Holiday (1944). Kids got into harmless jams that never questioned the system of—whatever: sexism, parental obtuseness. Here is some dialogue among Jim Stark, the main character of Rebel played by James Dean, his parents, and a grandmother. Nobody understands anybody else.

FRANK STARK: We give you love and affection, don’t we? Well, then what is it? Was it because we went to that party? Well, you know what kind of drunken brawls those kind of parties turn into. It’s not a place for kids.

MRS. CAROL STARK: A minute ago, you said you didn’t care if he drinks.

MRS. STARK, JIM’S GRANDMOTHER: He said a little drink.

JIM STARK: You’re tearing me apart!

MRS. CAROL STARK: [shocked] What?

JIM STARK: You, you say one thing, he says another, and everybody changes back again!

MRS. CAROL STARK: That’s a fine way to behave!

MRS. STARK, JIM’S GRANDMOTHER: Well, you know who he takes after.

Alfred Hitchcock

This man invented the thriller. At the height of his career in the 1960s he turned out one masterful suspense film after another, nearly all embraced by viewers the world over. He was too big and important to stay with one studio. He did North by Northwest (1959) for MGM but formed his own TV production company for Psycho (1960). Studios shied away from it because of the content. Paramount co-produced Vertigo (1958).

Strangers on a Train

. . . made several important art films about such subjects as bridges and skyscrapers and a few feature films about American jazz and drug addiction. She was totally out of the mainstream with her 16mm camera and miniscule crew. She was an artist before her time. In the late 1950s and ’60s almost no one wanted to see films about gay African Americans or heroin-addicted saxophone players. Below is a link to a retrospective about her work.

Shirley Clarke Retrospective

Independent Styles After 1960

It’s a miracle that any independent films were made at all before 1960. Society was much tighter and preferences were narrowed. Audiences generally were clueless about alternative cinema, and—big differences—there was no Internet, no YouTube, no digital equipment you might make a movie with for small change such as iMovie for editing and GarageBand for adding music, two programs Apple has always given away.

In the 1960s, change, technological and social, marched across the land, slow at first, then racing. Vietnam brought about much rethinking. Countercultures flourished. Racism eased. Pot abounded. New thinking roamed. Women spoke out. Something called the environment was discovered and gradually embraced. Video rentals and purchases opened up entire oeuvres of filmmakers to you. You might see the latest Stanley Kubrick flick at the local theatre; but now you could rent most of his other films, study his output, get to know the man and his work. For a time, in the eighties and nineties, you copied films you wanted to keep on VHS tape. Then DVD and the Internet made it so easy to simply buy or rent through the mail or instantly download that you left off copying. You can call the sixties and decades beyond many things, but it was certainly a time for national film-consciousness. One measure of this: the number of young people wanting to major in film skyrocketed. I know. I taught film during this period. At the start, one or two students wanted to major in film. By the 20-oughts, the whole class did. So-called film schools sprouted like dandelions in Spring.

Jonas Mekas, a Lithuanian immigrant, was an early art-film advocate. He hung out with the likes of Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, and Salvador Dali. He edited a publication called Film Culture and wrote a column about film for The Village Voice. As far as I can determine, he has made hundreds, probably thousands, of films, starting in 1953 and continuing at least to 2006 when he made a film a day—365 in all—to celebrate Apple’s introduction of the iPod, at the age of eighty-four.

Mekas makes jerky, inelegant—or at least unpretentious—films of everyday life, particularly his own life. It snowed in NYC. Mekas got someone to film him taking a stroll down a sidewalk. A friend baptized her baby. Mekas was there capturing the event on film. There is virtually no difference between what Mekas does and the home movie, except Mekas’s films unfold much faster. Mekas apparently likes quick cuts more than the average home movie maker does. One reviewer called Mekas a “diarist.” He was put on Earth to remind us of the significance of the ordinary, the worthiness of preserving the here and now. He has influenced filmmakers around the world.

One of his best-known films is As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000), about family and friends. Here is Mekas’s three-minute version of the original five-hour film. Mekas narrates. Without the narration, the snippet would make no sense at all to most people:

As I Was Moving Ahead . . .

Not always. I showed my students a reel of Brakhage films a number of years ago. All were harsh—hard on the eyes and grating to the ears. Students demanded I turn the projector off or they’d throw it out the window. You know you are trafficking in something important when you get responses like that.

Here is a six-and-a-half-minute film by him, entitled:

I . . . Dreaming (1988)

John Cassavetes

Kramer and Kubrick worked within the studio system. John Cassavetes, a New York-based actor and filmmaker, worked on his own, without benefit of (or obstruction from) studios. He just picked up a 16mm camera, got some friends together, and made longish, often improvised films about friends and family. Shadows (1959) is about a troublesome triangle among a jazz musician, his sister, and his agent. Faces (1968) is about an older man who leaves his wife for a younger woman. Probably Cassavetes’s best-known film is A Woman Under the Influence (1975), which takes on the problem of mental illness in a middle-age woman, played by Cassavetes’s wife Gena Rowlands. This film was nominated for two Oscars (Rowlands and Cassavetes) and won a Golden Globe for Rowlands. Here is link to a trailer for:

A Woman Under the Influence

. . . was for several decades considered the premiere American independent filmmaker. He tried working with a studio, Paramount, once—only once. Though dissension and compromise marked production, the movie that emerged from the deal with the devil—Baby It’s You (1983), about two young people trying to find themselves and relate to each other—is actually pretty good. It eschews the kidflick happy ending. After this film Sayles chose to work entirely on his own—financing, writing, acting, directing, cutting—doing it all.

Sayles went on to make such important films as City of Hope (1991), Lone Star (1996), and Men With Guns (1997). Many of Sayles’s films have a strong sense of less-than-perfect societies and how individuals in them deal with disappointment, bigotry, and compromised dreams.

Here is a video about Matewan (1987), a Sayles film having to do with the gunning down of coal miners on strike in Appalachia. You get to hear Sayles’s account of his dealings with studios and how the massacre was virtually unknown outside of West Virginia.

Matewan

Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984) is often considered what the American indie film should be—experimental, uniquely toned, and delicately climaxed. The tone of the film is a droll/comic/sad/existential mix. You smile and snicker but seldom laugh aloud. It’s about three NYC losers on a journey across America with questions they can’t answer because they don’t know what to ask.

Here is a clip from Stranger Than Paradise:

Some people call Tarantino “Hollywood on steroids.” Or “Hollywood without censors.” It’s like Hollywood went sissy; Quentin came ’round to save us from PC and corporate mentality. There’s no law and order in Pulp Fiction. I take that back: Bruce Willis finds a cop and says the mob is after him. Cop says, “What for?” Willis says, “Gambling debt.” Cop says, “Don’t worry, gambling’s illegal.” For all the shooting and killing, you never hear cop sirens in Pulp Fiction. This is a world without cops.

Here is a trailer for Tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious Basterds, which won an Oscar and was nominated for six others:

Inglourious Basterds

Solondz is a tough filmmaker. He doesn’t believe in standard film technique or in telling standard stories. His Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) is about suburban Hell. It focuses on Dawn (Heather Matarazzo), a thirteen-year-old girl in middle school in New Jersey. She’s not sweet or pretty, and she gets picked-on constantly by her classmates. She’s a loner, always seen trying to fit in but not knowing how. Her parents are not sensitive to her depression, nor is her brother. She herself is not aware of her depression. Being on a constant downer is for Dawn simply what life is about. Her younger sister is the pretty one, confident and outgoing. Nobody learns anything at the school. Learning is beside the point. The teachers are unaware that no learning goes on, or they are cynical and just put their time in. Teaching is a job, not a calling. The kids just have to go to the school. It’s what school is. It’s what kids do. Everyone puts in their time. In all, Welcome to the Dollhouse is a bleak and unsentimental view of uncaring America, peopled with kids and grown-ups who just don’t give a shit.

Solondz’s Palindromes (2005) is much “worse”: it’s even tougher to take and nearly impossible to understand. This film baffles critics. Most hate it, but a few perceive sly, postmodern art in it. Here’s why Palindromes has so much going against it: first, the story is about a thirteen-year-old girl, Aviva, who is pregnant. (A palindrome is a word that is spelled the same way forwards or backwards.) Pedophilia is an inherently repugnant topic. But more troubling, Aviva is played by eight different actors including a chubby girl, a skinny girl, an obese woman, a boy, and the well-known Hollywood fixture Jennifer Jason Leigh, who was past forty when she did the film. Plus three more Avivas! And third, the dialogue is flat and amateurish. In fact, the whole film feels like a bad film.

But the few critics who like the film feel the bad-film-ness and the multiple casting of Aviva are intentional, maybe even strokes of genius. They put audiences off. They upset all expectations. You never feel cozy with the story. Solondz won’t let you.

John Waters

Later in his career, Waters calmed down, so to speak, and made more accessible films. His Hairspray (1988) was a pop blockbuster and was transformed into a successful Broadway musical (though not by Waters), then into a movie starring John Travolta (costumed as a fat woman) and directed by Adam Shankman in 2007. USA Today called the movie “one big, loud, tacky party, sure to offend the neighbors—particularly those with no tolerance for racial humor, fat jokes, or sexual innuendo.” So in spite of all this watering down, much of Waters’s original happy vulgarity survives.

The Coen Brothers

Usually Joel writes, Ethan directs. Or they both write. Or they both direct. Whichever, it’s a productive team which has turned out some great indies. Lately (2007) the brothers did No Country for Old Men, a heavy contemplation of evil roaming the plains of West Texas. Ostensibly, No Country for Old Men is a thriller based on an old plot device: a drug deal gone bad. There is a valise full of money. There’s always a valise full of money, isn’t there? People kill for it, don’t they? But in this film, there is coincidence and accident, and stuff that happens unpredictably and messes up the thriller mold. In a typical thriller, the sheriff is supposed to catch the bad guy. That’s too easy here. Evil walks.

Below is clip from No Country for Old Men about a coin toss. Never has such a simple act seemed so sinister:

No Country for Old Men

OTHER NOTABLE CONTEMPORARY INDIES

Terry Zwigoff has made a couple of engaging indies—Crumb (1994) and Ghost World (2001)—both about outsiders. Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini did American Splendor in 2003, about self-pitying underground comic-book maker Harvey Pekar. Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995) has been called a horror film of the soul, though it does not look or feel like a horror film. It’s about one woman’s self-imposed isolation in suburbia and the wretchedly tiny life she has made for herself. Haynes’s Far From Heaven is remarkably similar in theme to Safe but very different in style. It’s about the horror of living in the restrictive fifties. Haynes has imitated—resurrected may be a better word—the look and feel of “weepies”—that is, female-centered romances of that decade.

Haynes’s latest film is hard to classify. It’s a kind of dramatized documentary on the life of Bob Dylan called I’m Not There (2007) with six—shades of Todd Solondz!—actors playing Dylan, including Kate Blanchett.

Richard Linklater is the indie chronicler of youth. His films catch young people in different life stages with different possibilities—or its lack. Slacker (1991) is about that perplexing period in life when you don’t know whether to go on being cool or get a job. Dazed and Confused (1993) is also about youth smacked over the head by impending adulthood; Before Sunset (1995) is a romantic idyll about a guy and a girl spending a day, but not the night, together in Vienna. Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006) are strange films that talk and talk, mainly about un-filmic philosophical matters. Both films were first shot live then converted to an animated look via a computer. In 2008 Linklater came out with an endearing film, Orson and Me, about a youth who gets a minor part in Orson Welles’s WPA production about Julius Caesar.

Lisa Cholodenko has made a couple of Southern California-based indie films, mainly about family and relationships. Her latest is The Kids Are All Right (2010), featuring two lesbians, their teen children, and their sperm donor. Before this, she did a film called High Art (1998), in which a young woman editor at a magazine enters the life of a high-octane photographer. Laurel Canyon (2002) is about the record industry and sundry high-living goings-on. Connect to a trailer for:

The link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_film

Other Styles

Here are a few more styles to round out our survey of filmmaking tendencies.

FILM NOIR

The French gave this term to certain American films that they couldn’t see during WWII. When they did get a load of them they were surprised at the pessimistic tone many Hollywood films had taken on. These dark films were virtually always about crime. Some had happy endings, but most ended in death or imprisonment, mainly for men. “Film noir” in French means “black film.”

Film noir came on during the end of the US Depression and found a ready audience in the United States. Hollywood may have produced too many films with frothy wrap-ups, which more sophisticated viewers were impatient with. There was a market for downer films—not a particularly large market, but a profitable niche market made up of filmgoers who were okay with bleak.

Film noirs were generally shot dark with lots of shadows, lots of blackness. Wide-angle lenses deepened focus and distorted perspective. Some critics feel that noir starts in black. Cinematographers then gradually add light, just enough to make out figures and important props. Here is a shadowy trailer from Out of the Past (1947), a noir shot by Nicholas Musuraca:

   Momento (2000)

   Road to Perdition (2002)

   Sin City (2005)

   A History of Violence (2005)

Chinatown, released in 1974, has often been called the greatest noir ever made. It has all the ingredients of noir—confusion, obsession, crime and perversity, a sort of femme fatale (though softened and made a victim), and the obligatory unhappy ending. But it lacks the dark, black and white photography of classic noir. In fact, since it is set in sunny Los Angeles, it is uncharacteristically bright, an ironic touch.

Here is a trailer for Chinatown which, though a bit overheated, nevertheless picks up many features of noir.

Chinatown

. . . has to do with literally depicting reality on the screen—not symbolically or indirectly but directly. This is accomplished by foreswearing special effects, toning down music, and adopting a near-documentary style of shooting and editing. Realists in all the arts—not just in film, but in photography, painting, poetry, and fiction—believe in showing actual hunger, violence, and injustice reflected in faces and captured in incidents. In fact, realist artists tend to lean to the political left to show an uncaring and exploitative capitalist set of values at the root of much woe in the world.

For example, the British filmmaker Ken Loach has made a career, stretching over forty-plus years, of depicting a variety of social problems and how they affect ordinary people. His Bread and Roses (2000) is about the screwing-over of immigrant workers in Los Angeles hotels who strike over low pay and poor working conditions. Loach recruited actual exploited workers to play certain parts. Nothing quite captures oppression better than the faces of the oppressed.

Loach evokes the clash of cultures created by contemporary immigration in his Ae Fond Kiss (2004), a story about a Pakistani youth and an Irish schoolteacher who fall in love, and the complications of family and church this brings about. In My Name is Joe (1998), an alcoholic man struggles to overcome a tendency to violence without completely succeeding. This realistic predicament stands in contrast to the Hollywood happy ending of When a Man Loves a Woman (1994) when Meg Ryan triumphs over her alcoholism to reunite with forbearing husband Andy Garcia and live happily ever after. Hollywood presents situations as it knows viewers would like them to resolve; realists like Loach offer viewers resolutions that are closer to real life.

The Belgian Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, are among the most honored realist filmmakers working today. They have picked up a couple of Palme d’Or—Cannes’ highest award—and many top honors in both Europe and the United States. Their films are about little people with everyday conflicts. In La Promesse (1996) a youth struggles to keep secrets about what his immoral father has done. In The Son (2002) a petty thief is tempted to sell the infant son of his girlfriend to a baby black market. These characters don’t save the world; they save themselves.

Trailer shows the Dardenne’s stripped-down style:

La Promesse

Here is a list of well-known American formalist films. Their titles alone should provide a blanket definition.

   The Wizard of Oz

   All Disney films

   Harry Potter films

   All Tim Burton Films

   Star Wars films

   Lord of the Ring films

   Alice in Wonderland

   Batman, Iron Man, Superman, etc.

Every summer Hollywood releases a spate of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi films that rely more on special effects to move audiences than on humanistic storytelling. In the summer of 2010, these formalist films were released:

   Prince of Persia

   Resident Evil: Afterlife

   Toy Story 3

   Despicable Me

   Inception

   The Expendables

There have been many serious formalist filmmakers over the decades. Not all are prisoners of dumb-ass Hollywood. Julie Taymor’s films—Titus (1999), Frida (2002)—have many stylistic touches that help her get to the truth of Shakespeare in the first instance and to the art of Frida Kahlo in the second. The champ of special effects in the United States has to be James Cameron, whose Avatar (2009) scarcely presents us with a virgin image; yet his intent was not just to have viewers go gaga, but to make statements about rapacious corporations exploiting indigenous peoples. American expatriate Terry Gilliam (now residing in England) always makes formalist films—Brazil (1985), The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009)—which are not only downright fun to watch but also make profound statements about society and human nature.

Here is a trailer for Imaginarium:

Trailer for City of Lost Children:

Triumph of the Will

Crips and Bloods: Made in America (2008)

“With a first-person look at the notorious Crips and Bloods, this film examines the conditions that have lead to decades of devastating gang violence among young African Americans growing up in South Los Angeles” (from IMDB). One tracking shot swims past about a dozen middle-age women in close-up who lost their sons to gang violence and become increasingly sad, finally coming to tears. I don’t know how director Stacy Peralta got this amazing shot. It’s an ingenuous way of showing what gang violence does to mothers. Here is a trailer:

Crips and Bloods

This film is about the Scot Andy Goldsworthy, who makes sculptures out of perishable natural materials. The fact that they will ultimately deteriorate is a large part of Goldsworthy’s point. The film is by the German Thomas Riedelsheimer:

Rivers and Tides

“Indies” International: Western Europe

Many countries have popular cinemas that are crafted for local tastes and not especially meant for export. The best-known is the Indian “Bollywood” which makes colorful, expensive song-and-dance movies out of Mumbai (formally Bombay) aimed at the newly affluent Indian middle class. A few Bollywood films break into the American and world markets.

There are also many filmmakers from abroad who, like serious American independent filmmakers, long to reach worldwide audiences. This chapter is about their films. It starts with three well-known post-WWII movements among European filmmakers then comes up to the present with descriptions of notable contemporary European off-mainstream filmmakers.

ITALIAN NEO-REALISM

This was—and still is—a movement among Italian filmmakers who were weary of irrelevant entertainments coming from the likes of Cinecittà, the big Italian movie studio located in Rome. Italian post-WWII filmmakers especially wanted to make films that reflected actual conditions of poverty and inept social services following the war.

Neo-realists worked cheap, often using amateur actors plucked from the streets and shooting on these very streets instead of on studio back lots. Read more about realist style in the last chapter.

Well-known neo-realists and some of their films:

The Bicycle Thief

The Gleaners and I

Most of these Kitchen-Sink filmmakers passed on from realism to make films of wider appeal. Richardson directed the global hit Tom Jones (1963), which launched the movie career of Albert Finney, while Reisz directed another worldwide global favorite, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), starring Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep. Lucid trailer:

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Werner Herzog likes to make man-against-nature films. His Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) is about Lope de Aguirre, a sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador and his water-drenched contingent slogging through the Amazon rain forest vainly seeking gold. He’s made mad by the jungle, the rushing Amazon River, the little monkeys that bounce off his shoulders.

While Herzog was shooting in South America, he also made another raving-mad film called Fitzcarraldo (1982), about a crazy European who wanted to get to Peru to start a rubber-tree plantation. He has natives pull a large boat over a mountain to get to his destination. Oh, I forgot: he also wanted to build an opera house in the middle of the jungle. Both films star the estimable German actor Klaus Kinski.

Here is a trailer for Aguirre, the Wrath of God:

France

Contemporary French filmmakers of note include Claude Sautet, whose A Heart in Winter (1992) is about a passionate violin player and the joyless man she has the misfortune to fall in love with. Jean-Paul Jeunet makes drop-dead gorgeous films, if you can get around the occasional grotesquery. Jeunet’s City of Lost Children (1995) is a mad-scientist film about a guy who looks as menacing as his weird goal—to capture the dreams of children. Amélie (2001) is about a naïve Parisian girl who seems compelled to help others. Eventually she falls in love.

You gotta look at a few minutes of a Jeunet film. Here is a trailer from Jeunet’s 2004 A Very Long Engagement:

In the 1990s, Great Britain produced a number of historical films that were successful, critically and financially, around the world. In particular:

Not all of these directors are British. Ivory was born in Berkeley, California, and Lee in Taiwan.

John Madden continued the historical tradition with his Shakespeare in Love (1998), but this delightful film is more speculation than fact. It’s about the young Will in love with someone he shouldn’t be. Madden is British through and through.

Trailer for Shakespeare in Love:

The Crying Game (1992) is set against Irish-English conflict. The story starts out a psychological thriller but soon takes on additional dimensions, including the unlikely presence of a black man in the Irish Republican Army and a startling case of sexual identity, which leads to deception. Neil Jordan directed.

Shaun of the Dead (2004) is a nutty mix of a guy trying to find himself and make amends to a pissed-off girlfriend while also dealing with an army of zombies. The film, directed by Edgar Wright, was a worldwide hit. A trailer:

Shaun of the Dead

“Indies” International: Moving East and South

We now move in several directions, into Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America.

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Three Czech films have taken Academy Awards for best foreign-language films. These are The Shop on Main Street (ds. Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos, 1965); Closely Watched Trains (d. Jiri Menzel, 1965); and Kolya (d. Jan Sverak, 1996). The Shop on Main Street takes place during World War II when the Germans were on the verge of invading Czechoslovakia. A Czech man is torn between turning in an old Jewish woman shopkeeper or just letting the matter go. Closely Watched Trains, also set during World War II, is about a boy who has the bad luck to come of age during troubling times. Kolya is about a once-carefree single man dumped with a five-year-old boy by an ex-wife who has had enough of mothering.

The best-known Czech filmmaker is Milos Forman, who after making some outstanding films in his native country (Loves of a Blonde, 1965; The Fireman’s Ball, 1967), made his way to the United States to direct the stellar One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), which took five Oscars, and Amadeus (1984), about the life of Mozart, which nailed down seven Oscars.

Two Polish filmmakers with secure global reputations are Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski. Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1958) is set against the backdrop of Germany’s surrender in 1945 and details attempts to assassinate a Communist commissioner of a small town in Poland. So much violence—the war and its aftermath—is in need of deliverance and humanity. The main character of Ashes and Diamonds, a soldier in the Polish army, may find them in a burned-out church where this poem is scratched on the wall:

“. . . are you as a blazing torch with flames

of burning rags falling about you flaming

You know not if flames bring freedom or death,

Consuming all that you must cherish.

[Will] ashes only be left, and want Chaos and tempest

Or will the ashes hold the glory of a starlike diamond

The Morning Star of everlasting triumph?”

Wajda made a pair of films about the legendary Lech Walesa, the Polish labor leader of Solidarity, the movement that prefigured the collapse of the Soviet empire. These are Man of Marble (1976) and Man of Iron (1981).

Wajda was feted with an honorary Oscar during the 2000 Academy Award proceedings.

While at film school, Roman Polanski made Knife in the Water (1962), an important film about male ego. The film is remarkably minimal. Polanski himself shot it and directed. The cast numbers three. An assistant or two hung out. The film gained worldwide recognition for Polanski and got an Oscar nomination. Polanski entered the United States via Great Britain and eventually made the towering Chinatown, which in 1974 won an Oscar for screenwriting and was nominated for just about every other award. Polanski’s The Pianist, about a well-known Jewish pianist caught up in WWII matters of survival, received three Oscars in 2002.

Knife in the Water

Szabo also directed the international production Sunshine (1999), which follows three generations of a Jewish family from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Hungarian revolt in 1956. Themes of persecution and rootless-ness center on a character played by the Brit Ralph Fiennes.

Hungarian filmmakers have put out a few quality films since 2000 though they are unknown to much of the world. An American Rhapsody (2001) is a poignant story about a family separated for decades by sweeping political changes in Europe. It stars the German Nastassja Kinski and the American Scarlett Johansson, and was directed by Eva Gardos.

Szabo returned to filmmaking in 2004 to do Becoming Julia, starring Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons. It’s about London theatre people in the 1930s and was based on a W. Somerset Maugham novel.

The remarkable Hungarian melodrama (1999) Gloomy Sunday, directed by Rolf Schübel explores a ménage à trois among a Nazi-era Budapest restaurant owner, his piano player, and a beautiful singer. The piano player writes songs so sad that people take their lives after hearing it.

A non-English clip from Gloomy Sunday:

   The Cranes are Flying (d. Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957). World War II again. The awful suffering of the Russian people. This film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1958. There is no more prestigious award.

   Solaris (d. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972). A slow meditation on life in outer space on a deep space craft.

   Seventeen Moments of Spring (d. Tatyana Lioznova, 1973). A 12-episode Soviet TV series about the well-known Soviet spy Yulian Samyonov who operated in both East and West Germany. Very popular in the Soviet Union and Germany.

   Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (d. Vladimir Menshov, 1979). Surprisingly realistic melodrama about three provincial young women who resettle in Moscow. Won an Oscar for best foreign-language film in 1980.

   Little Vera (d. Vasili Pichul, 1988). Another film about a young woman who relocates in Moscow from the provinces. Very popular in the Soviet Union. Also one of the first Russian films to show explicit sex.

(It’s not easy to find clips or trailers of any of these films with English subtitles.)

A REMARKABLE FILM FROM SAUDI ARABIA

Almost no films come to us from Saudi Arabia, and none by women. Wadjda (2012) is the exception. Directed by Haifaa al-Mansour—who gave directions to her crew from a van via walkie-talkie because women are not allowed to give orders to men in Saudi Arabia—Wadjda tells a simple but effective story about a rebellious 10-year-old girl who wants to own a bicycle. It’s not against the law in Arabia for girls to own bikes, but it is frowned upon. (Her mother claims that riding a bike will render her incapable of having children.) All the same, she finally gets her way.

We get a glimpse of Asian anthropology in Head On (2005), a joint German-Turkish production by Fatih Akin, a Turk. It’s about Turkish immigrants living in Germany. A young woman needs to escape her oppressive family and tries to snag an unmarried Turk. But the guy is a mess. He’s tried suicide several times, can’t get that right, doesn’t bathe, and works at a dumbshit job in a slummy bar.

In Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (2007), a young man searches for his father’s girlfriend in Istanbul. This film won many awards at European festivals.

IRAN

Iranian cinema is mature and world-class, and has been for decades—just as Iran is a mature and sophisticated nation. Iranian cinema goes back to the turn of the last century.

Probably the best-known Iranian filmmaker is Abbas Kiarostami, whose Taste of Cherry (1997) is about a man who wants to commit suicide. He has one problem. Islamic law requires that the dead be buried before sundown, and the man can’t find anyone to throw dirt on him after he’s done the deed—even though he’s already dug the grave. Atmospheric clip:

Taste of Cherry

Kandahar (2001) is one of the saddest films I have ever seen. Directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, also an Iranian, it’s about a Canadian-born Muslim woman who journeys to Afghanistan to rescue her imprisoned sister. It’s not easy.

One of the most moving films you’ll see from any country is the Iranian The Color of Paradise (1999), which is about a sightless boy who attends a school for the blind. Mohammed is blessed. His lack of sight is no real handicap. It might even be a life advantage. He is happy. He tunes into nature with a sensitivity which adults and sighted people have long forsaken. He hears the chirp of a newly hatched bird—which others cannot hear or decline to hear. He locates the bird on the ground by its chirping. He finds the tree it fell from. Clip:

The Color of Paradise

These films are not about anything very much—except life. The trilogy is about the everyday ups and downs of a poor Bengali family doing real things. Still, it touches you. The great New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael said this about Pather Panchali: “The first film by the masterly Satyajit Ray—possibly the most unembarrassed and natural of directors—is a quiet reverie about the life of an impoverished Brahmin family in a Bengali village. Beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love, it brought a new vision of India to the screen.”

Here is clip from the first Apu movie about the simplest of subjects: rain. Ray turns it into poetry.

Pather Panchali

Trailer for Monsoon Wedding:

A trailer for Brokeback Mountain:

Instead, she receives harsher treatment. Sembene’s latest film is Moolaadé (2004), about the horrors of female circumcision. Sembene continued to make films into his eighties. He died in 2007.

Trailer for Skin:

Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) is about the widening gap between parents and children—grown children with families—a common plot situation in cinema all around the world, especially in societies that have undergone enormous technological and social change. Ozu is not a sentimentalist. His camera work is plain and formal; some would call it minimalistic. Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953) is about a greedy peasant who steps on women to advance himself in the world.

By far the best-known contemporary Japanese filmmaker is Hayao Miyazaki, producer and director of what many feel are the world’s best animated films, called anime in Japan and in much of the world. His Princess Mononoke (1999), Spirited Away (2001), and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) did good business in the West. No one in the world, live action filmmaker or animator, does myth and the supernatural better.

Princess Mononoke

City of God

   The Mountain Patrol (d. Chuan Lu, 2004). Poachers keep killing off the rare, beautiful Tibetan antelope. A patrol is formed to hunt down the poachers who keep retreating higher into the Himalayas.

Spoken Words

There are still film buffs who, believe it or not, feel that the move to synchronized sound in the late 1920s was an artistic step backwards. These sentimentalists insist that the film experience is first and foremost a visual one. They hold that talking turns film into something it was never meant to be, something like inelegant radio with moving images.

NONE, SHORT, AND LONG

There is some truth to these sentiments. We do appreciate films with little talking and a maximum of arresting images. Carol Ballard’s The Black Stallion (1979) is a story about a boy who finally bonds with a horse after both have washed ashore on an uninhabited island following a shipwreck. The boy gradually wins the horse over, and the horse finally lets the boy ride him. But there is no dialogue. None is needed. Ballard makes what is essentially a silent picture, at least for the first third, although there is music and sound effects. The boy and horse are finally rescued and rejoin society, and after that there is dialogue, but you are a little disappointed. You enjoyed the wordless movie so much. Clip:

The Black Stallion

The Triplets of Belleville

Here is Andre Gregory in monolog:

My Dinner with Andre

Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof is probably too talky. The film has been packaged with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and distributed as Grind House (2007). In Death Proof, two groups of four stuntwomen in two cars go on and on about moviemaking, men, sex, food, drink, and how to get back at a crazy, dangerous, stunt car driver. You can sense that Tarantino’s film does not have enough story. But he had to end up with something like ninety minutes of usable film. So instead of trimming the droopy dialogue, he just left it in.

STYLIZED DIALOGUE

Some screenwriters regard dialogue as the stuff of art that might be rendered in interesting ways. If you limit yourself to responding only to “realistic” dialogue, you may cheat yourself. Stylized dialogue has potential to take spoken words to new levels.

The American playwright and filmmaker David Mamet writes dialogue in which characters give lines in a flat monotone and often repeat words—their own words and words of other speakers. In his House of Games (1987), a famous psychologist played by Lindsay Crouse has been humiliated by Joe Mantegna, a confidence man. She tries to con him back, but he catches on. The following scene takes place in a deserted baggage area of an airport. Note especially the repetition; read the dialogue as though it were music:

CROUSE: It was fate I found you.

MANTEGNA: Yes, it was.

CROUSE: Because together we can—

MANTEGNA: Yes, we can.

CROUSE: And when I saw, when I saw that they came after me—

MANTEGNA: It’s all right now. You’re safe.

CROUSE: No, I knew, I knew that I was being punished.

MANTEGNA: No, it was an accident.

CROUSE: No, I knew—that I was bad.

MANTEGNA: No—

CROUSE: No, I knew that I was bad. You know why? You know when I knew? Because I took your knife. That’s when I knew.

MANTEGNA: What knife?

The British filmmaker Sally Potter was enamored with Shakespearean verse when she made Yes in 2004. All the dialogue is in iambic pentameter, a venerated meter in which five lines of spoken words take the form of ta TA, ta TA, ta TA, ta TA, ta TA—that is, an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. This is the meter Shakespeare used for most all of his poems and plays. Here are a few lines of iambic pentameter from one of Will’s sonnets.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Though art more lovely and more temperate

Harsh winds do shake the darling buds of May

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

And here is a character from Yes named Cleaner doing iambic pentameter:

In fact it’s really only common sense;

There’s no such thing as nothing, not at all.

It may be really very, very small

But it’s still there. In fact I think I’d guess

That “no” does not exist. There’s only “yes.”

In the Coen brothers’ True Grit (2010), a sort of Western set in rural Arkansas (but actually filmed in California), everyone talks semi-eloquently, like something you’d read in a bad Victorian novel. LaBeouf is a Texas Ranger, Mattie a fourteen-year-old girl who has hired LaBeouf and Rooster Cogburn to find the murderer of her father.

LABEOUF: You give out very little sugar with your pronouncements. While I sat there watchin’ I gave some thought to stealin’ a kiss . . . though you are very young, and sick . . . and unattractive to boot. But now I have a mind to give you five or six good licks with my belt.

MATTIE ROSS: One would be just as unpleasant as the other.

Trailer in which some of this elevated dialogue comes through:

True Grit

Most animated films have jettisoned the thees and thous of fairy tales and cutsie kid books of old in favor of more colloquial dialogue. From Tangled (2010):

FLYNN RIDER: Rapunzel?

RAPUNZEL: Eugene!

FLYNN RIDER: Did I ever tell you I’ve got a thing for brunettes?

And from A Bug’s Life (1998):

DOT: But it’s a rock.

FLIK: [shouting] I know it’s a rock! Don’t you think I know a rock when I see a rock? I’ve spent a lot of time around rocks!

DOT: You’re weird, but I like you.

NARRATION

. . . is off-camera storytelling usually by a character in the film. Good narration has potential to move a story along swiftly and make it unnecessary to dramatize or show stuff that just isn’t important.

Martin Scorsese uses narration probably more effectively than any other American filmmaker. His Goodfellas (1990), for example, is a dense story which benefits from the narration of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), a small-time hood, to speed the plot.

Halfway through the film, when pressure on Hill starts to mount, we follow him through a particularly hectic Sunday. We see him stuffing three or four guns into a paper bag, then dropping the bag into the trunk of his car. He wants to fob the guns off on Jimmy (Robert De Niro), but Jimmy doesn’t like the guns. In dialogue we learn from an angry Jimmy that his silencers don’t match the guns. Henry narrates:

Right away I knew he didn’t want them. I knew I was going to get stuck for the money. I only bought the damn guns because he wanted them, and now he didn’t want them.

Meanwhile Woody Allen uses narration in his You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger (2010) so sparingly you have to wonder why it’s in the film at all. A few afternoons of sprucing up the dialogue would have made the narration unnecessary.

In the Edward Zwick thriller Blood Diamond (2006), about smuggling “conflict diamonds” out of Africa, a minor character sets up the whole film in a kind of narration. The movie starts at a big-time G8 (“the Group of Eight”—meaning the eight most influential economic powers of the world) conference on diamonds in Antwerp. The conference host addresses the body of delegates:

Throughout the history of Africa, whenever a substance of value was found, the locals die in great number and in misery.

At this point the movie cuts to shots of impoverished African workers sifting through mud in a creek for diamonds. The host continues to explain in voice-over:

Now this was true of ivory, rubber, gold, and it is now true of diamonds.

Cut back to creek. We see guards on the creek bed brandishing AK-47s. A worker finds a diamond and pops it into his mouth. Cut back to host:

Now according to a devastating report by Global Witness, these stones are being used to purchase arms and finance civil war.

Cut to creek. Host continues in voice-over.

We must act to prohibit the direct or indirect importing of all rough diamonds from conflict zones.

A guard sees what the worker has done, gets him to spit out the diamond, then shoots him in the face. The host gets the last (camera) shot. His remarks, delivered in less than two minutes and inter-cut with the creek scene, set up the whole film. The sequence demonstrates the often artful and functional interplay between spoken words and images.

IRONIC NARRATION

Occasionally filmmakers and their writers pull off what I call ironic narration. That is, there is disparity between what we see and what we hear. They are at odds. Into the Wild, the 2007 film directed by Sean Penn, tells the story of a young dissident, Chris McCandless, who, fed up with consumerist society, strikes off for the wilds of Alaska. He narrates, and fine narration it is, for without it we would not understand his particular pantheism, his love of nature, his quest to live authentically. Visuals would not be enough. For example:

Two years he [McCandless himself] walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, ’cause “the West is the best.” And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.

This is practical or literal narration because what we see reinforces what we hear. But several times during the film, the voice of Chris’s sister Carine swims into the soundtrack. She talks about how dysfunctional the family is.

As we hear this, we see happy, happy. Happy birthday parties, happy dinners. The visuals lie. We trust Carine’s commentary more than what we see. Intermittent happiness, yes, but long-term, authentically, no.

No, we don’t want to jettison spoken words from movies. They tell us things visuals cannot, and vice versa. Even the purists of the early sound era admitted that movie scenes needed titles inserted now and then because pure visuals just couldn’t do it all. Voices in films have tones of voice, character, and emphasis. Titles do not. The question is not whether movies should have spoken words, but how they are employed.

Music

In the one hundred-years-plus history of the movies, almost no motion pictures played without music. Music has been so fundamental to moviegoers’ expectations that even during the so-called silent era theatre owners provided some kind of music, usually just a facile piano player who looked up at the screen and improvised romantic music, suspenseful music, or comic music—whatever the story called for.

Music is more primal than dialogue, and certainly more basic than sound effects and ambient sound. Music tells you how to react, then as now. If a scene had an ounce of ambiguity about it, the music you heard cleared matters up nearly instantly. You were invited to laugh or cry or at least put in some serious thinking about what was happening on the screen.

Piano players—and now and then, for big films, string quartets and full orchestras—had some leeway in the kind of music they would play for audiences. This piano player might be three shades more sentimental in his handling of screen melodrama than the mocking player in the theatre down the street. An orchestra might play something tight and regulated from Mozart or something expansive from Rachmaninoff. Whatever music flooded the auditorium (or bar backroom) had definite effects on audiences. They’d cry a little more with Rachmaninoff, bear up with Mozart.

The history of improvised piano accompaniment to early movies has yet to be written, probably because the subject was so hard to research, and nobody much gave a damn. How informative it would be now to know how Chaplin’s favorite accompanist treated his comedies, his pathos.

All this changed in 1927 when movie studios distributed locked-in music with their product. They hired composers to write scores, and with the arrival of new technology that is what you invariably heard. No variation, no uncontrollable improvising by strong-willed musicians.

The film usually credited with first utilizing synchronized sound is The Jazz Singer (1927) featuring Al Jolson who sang a lot of songs audiences in the twenties loved. Here is a link to a ten-minute excerpt of Jolson singing several songs.

The Jazz Singer

The imaging on the right of the film strip pictured here depicts the soundtrack to the film.

King of Jazz

Soon filmmakers hired composers of pop music, often rock, to do original soundtracks. The link below will take you to the official trailer of Requiem for a Dream (2000), about a pill-addicted woman (Ellen Burstyn) who is obsessed with being a contestant on a TV quiz show. Here are two links, first to a trailer, then to the popular Clint Mansell soundtrack:

Requiem for a Dream

Back in 1983 the film The Right Stuff appeared, based on achievements of the Mercury space program astronauts. The original novel, written by Tom Wolfe, and the picture, directed by Philip Kaufman, was not straight-ahead glory. Instead, it mixed achievement, national pride, and satire. The astronauts are rendered human but not superhuman and Wolfe and Kaufman had some fun spoofing the space race and American exceptionalism. The music, by Bill Conti, is probably mock-epic.

Here is a scene from early in The Right Stuff when test pilot Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) breaks the sound barrier.

The Right Stuff

Aliens

I also mentioned a film way back in “About the Book” called Ballast. It also forgoes music. The tendency, in fact, among contemporary filmmakers is to use less and less music. The opening scene of Clint Eastwood’s thoughtful Hereafter (2010) is a stupendous digital creation of a Tsunami wreaking havoc and drowning people in a seaside community in Indonesia. Waves push, crush, smother, taking out trees and entire structures. People flail, get hit in the head by stray timber. The scene is reminiscent of video footage of NYC residents running away from the enormous cloud of smoke generated by the collapse of the World Trade Towers. And yet Eastwood provided no music to guide our response to the terror and destructiveness of the tsunami. He didn’t have to. I have a feeling that if Eastwood (or anybody) had made this film ten years before, it would have loud, brassy, minor-chord apocalyptic music.

Hereafter

The first link below is an involving trailer but not much Orff; the second is all Orff but doesn’t reveal much about the film.

Badlands

Picnic at Hanging Rock

The Piano

Mix and Dub

In recent years film sound has become so complex that people called sound designers have joined sound teams to oversee the putting-together of complicated soundtracks. The sound designer is not just an uber-technician. She is also an artist. She makes aesthetic decisions about:

   How long a sound should run

   How loud it should be

   How it might be modified—or digitally processed

   How it plays with other sounds, before, after, or at the same time

   How, if it all, it should be repeated, lengthened, or shortened

   How clear or in the foreground it should be, or how muted

If the film is big and aurally intricate, the sound designer works with a very large staff. When The Exorcist was digitized and re-released in 2000, Steve Boeddeker came on as sound designer. (He is also credited as the film’s composer of original music.) He had over thirty people “under” him, an assortment of dialogue editors, music editors, effects editors, mixers, equalizers, digitizers, and small armies of assistants and file librarians. As far as I can tell, the original Exorcist, which appeared in 1973, had no single person designated as sound designer. (The term has come into film lingo only in the last ten or fifteen years.) Certainly someone was in charge of sound for The Exorcist, but not formally so.

Click below to reach a clip which includes dozens of sounds heard in The Exorcist. Each had to be made or found, processed, edited, and mixed:

Here is a short video showing Foley people at work. They are delighted to share their aural secrets with you.

Foley people at work:

Another film with a complex soundtrack is WALL-E (2008), the Pixar futuristic animated film about a love affair between two robots in conflict with machines who want to keep humans subservient to them in a huge spacecraft. Below is a link to a lecture and demonstration by Ben Burtt, the sound designer for the film. You will learn that Burtt had to keep track of 2,600 separately recorded sounds or files. He worked on the film for three years.

Sound for WALL-E:

Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Story: Conflict and Meaning

The story is one of the most enduring inventions of the human species. It predates the wheel, the axe, the rope. It has common elements employed by a broad range of spinners of tales: cavemen (and women maybe) sitting around fires relating daring exploits after successful hunts; Roman soldiers boasting of glorious conquests; monks, priests, and nuns relating parables of right behavior to the laity; and Hollywood filmmakers who aim to thrill audiences with harrowing car chases and shootouts. All tell stories with the same elements listed below:

   Conflict

   Characters

   Setting

   Meaning

   Character Relationships

   Symbol

   Tone

   Resolution

A film story lasts only two hours, more or less. You will derive more from this book and from the films you see by endeavoring to keep track of more than one of these story elements at the same time, like multitasking.

CONFLICT

Aristotle proposed six kinds of conflict in stories—he was writing mainly about Greek drama, but they apply to film as well. Here are the six, along with films that exemplify the conflicts:

Schindler’s List, On the Waterfront, 25th Hour, Citizen Kane, Casablanca. In each of these films, main characters are conflicted between what they ought to do and how they might get off the hook. The goal always is to know the right thing and do it.

Person vs. person

The Wizard of Oz, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, High Noon, The Fugitive. Protagonists (main characters) are up against people who would afflict them.

Person vs. society

The Grapes of Wrath, Star Wars, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, All Quiet on the Western Front. Now protagonists are in conflict with entire societies, ranging in size and importance from the whole galaxy to the social arrangements of particular institutions, such as mental hospitals.

Person vs. nature (including natural disasters)

2012, Children of Men, Armageddon, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Into the Wild. Protagonists are in conflict with the raw outdoors. Weather, vast space, wild animals, or epidemics might figure.

Person vs. the supernatural

Nosferatu, Dracula, Ghost, Hamlet, Vampires Suck, Lord of the Rings. This group of films rests on forces that can’t be explained by science or known laws of nature. You don’t know what will happen next unless you possess the keys to the magic.

Person vs. technology (not from Aristotle)

2001: A Space Odyssey, Frankenstein, Godzilla, A.I. Artificial Intelligence. These films are based on extensions of science with potential to do harm.

No conflict, no story. Conflict drives story, creates interest and suspense. We watch to learn how matters will turn out. Some people find a film like Tree of Life (2011) hard to follow. The conflict is very muted, more like poetry than narrative.

Some of these conflicts are simply more sophisticated than others. The conflict of a person against himself has potential for all sorts of moral issues beyond the mere laying down of plot. Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) must see the essential evil of Nazism and the wrongness of employing Jewish slave labor. Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) has to finally understand how corrupting his power has been for himself and others—though he never does. Great literature, including great films, always comes down to moral choices. On the other hand, movies about vampires seldom have anything to do with morality. Usually, human beings are not responsible for bringing vampires into existence. They just turn up, grab you, and plunge teeth.

But responsibility looms very large in films like these:

   One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: What is the responsibility of a facility such as a mental hospital for treating patients humanely?

   The Wizard of Oz: Is Dorothy ever going to grow up and stand up to the Wicked Witch?

   Jurassic Park and Frankenstein: Ought science mess with nature? Do you get what you deserve when you do?

Even when a character is not in conflict with herself, she may face multiple obstacles that seem nearly impossible to surmount. The main character of a film called Winter’s Bone (2010) is a girl of only 16 (Jennifer Lawrence)—in the book; the film insists she is seventeen. She faces so many conflicts the situation seems hopeless. The main one has to do with locating her fugitive, meth-cooking father who has skipped bail. If she can’t find him the bail-bonds people will take her house and kick her out, along with her mentally challenged mother and her two young brothers, into the cold of an Ozark winter. Plus the male code of the region insists that men reveal nothing, not to the law, not even to innocent family members. Plus it is cold. Plus Jennifer, though plucky, is inexperienced. How can she hope to go up against cynical, law-hating mountain men?

Here is a trailer for the film that sets up these conflicts:

Who determines myth, epic, or theme?

You do. There is nothing wrong with seeing a film as myth or epic and not especially as truthful theme. There is pleasure in following myth. There is pleasure in following epic. Some films embody both. You learn about your culture and your country by tuning in to myth and epic in narrative. Consider:

Avatar is more mythic and epic than thematic. We’ve been there before. Nature needs protection. Indigenous peoples need protection. Environment good, corporations bad. Good (should) prevail over evil.

Up also feels familiar. Old guys have to rejuvenate themselves, find purpose, take action. This applies to people of any age.

Toy Story 3 may be the most thematic of the films I’ve mentioned. And its theme isn’t very pretty, long term. Bonnie too will grow up and lose interest in toys. The toys will seem dated to her. Their arms will fall off, their facial features will rub off with time. All of the Toy Story movies, in fact, have streaks of ugly realism like this. Surely all toys are destined eventually for landfill. But so are we all, in one century or another. Shudder, shudder. Now and then theme should make you shudder.

Wishful thinking

Meaning in many films often takes the form of wishful thinking. The Na’vi finally beat the corporation, but realistically speaking in many places in the world—our world—primitive peoples have not beat back the corporations. Not in the jungles of Asia, not in the oilfields of Africa, not in the forests of the Amazon. It is our choice to smile at the happy ending and accept it or to disbelieve. Amreeka too verges on wishful thinking. What really are the chances that an uprooted Palestinian woman will meet a kindly Jewish man? We have to believe. We have to believe in miracles.

Or maybe the point of Amreeka is to show how two people who are traditionally at odds might find love—in another country. Their relationship breaks patterns. It’s up to the director and writer Cherien Dabis to make the example convincing.

It is the rare film that tells us things we don’t want to hear, that evades myth. Here are three, which happened to be in the Oscar race in 2010 when Avatar was competing.

The Hurt Locker. This is Catherine Bigelow’s little anti-war film of 2008, though she claims in interviews she did not set out to make an anti-war film. I’ve mentioned the film in several other chapters. To repeat, this film is about a bomb defuser with the US Army in Iraq. The guy, Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), gets into a heavy, awkward bomb-repelling suit, pulls the visor of a thick helmet down—the temperature might be 110 degrees inside there—slips into an astronaut-type suit, and starts digging in a hole in a Baghdad street for one of those IEDss. Who would agree to take on such a job? The answer to this question spawns a multiplicity of authentic themes, not myths. There is the theme of courage, yes, but there are also themes of suppressed fear, of alienation, of outright craziness, of the testing of manhood, of life on the edge and what it does to people who live that way.

One brilliant sequence shows what this kind of life does to people who live as James does: he is on leave. He rejoins his family back in the states. To get back to normal, he goes to the supermarket for his family. He contemplates a long aisle of sugary, inconsequential breakfast cereal. No box will blow up in his face. Still, he cannot decide on which brand to take home. It doesn’t matter. There is no risk, no meaning. He says nothing, but the look on his face mirrors American society: our choices are inauthentic. The real choice is between life and death. Link:

The Hurt Locker

In Enemy of the State (1999), the flashy melodrama directed by the late Tony Scott, we quickly come to care about Will Smith, a lawyer who is in jeopardy. There are bad guys in the government who think Smith has a videotape that will implicate them in the assassination of a United States senator. Smith doesn’t know what is going on except that people are trying to kill him. He runs and runs. He is monitored by all sorts of high-tech electronic devices. Dozens of experts are arrayed against him. It looks hopeless.

In 16 Blocks (2006), Bruce Willis is a burned-out, seemingly ineffectual cop who has been given the job of transporting a prisoner from the NYC jail to the courthouse, a distance of 16 blocks. Seems like an easy assignment. But the prisoner will give testimony implicating a lot of corrupt cops who scheme to take out the prisoner somewhere en route to the courthouse. The bad cops think that Willis will be a pushover—that’s why they gave him the job. So conflict of plot: Can Willis deliver the prisoner to the courthouse? The film was directed by Richard Donner.

Crank (2006) is driven by a crazy plot reminiscent of the setup for the Keanu Reeves–Sandra Bullock flick Speed (1994). Writers-directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor contrive a mob that injects Jason Statham, a hit man wanting to go straight, with a drug that will kill him if his heart rate falls to a low level. So Statham runs, fights, gets pissed off, and even makes love in public with Amy Smart to keep his heart ratcheted up. It’s a silly, though energizing plot.

Conflict of character

Better stories feature characters we can care about. They too are in conflict but on a deeper level than mere plot. The conflict has to do with who they are instead of what they do or what happens to them. In Titanic, Jack doesn’t really have a personal problem. Cameron makes Jack brave and resourceful, and he’s likable so the audience can cozy up to him.

No, it’s Rose who has the main stress. It isn’t just that she doesn’t want to marry the domineering, arrogant Cal Hockley (Billy Zane). To call off the marriage would disappoint her mother and apparently leave them penniless. This is real pressure.

Bruce Willis in 16 Blocks has to hold the bad cops at bay. To prevail, he has to summon something within himself he has lost.

Will Smith’s personal problem in Enemy of the State is at first pretty basic. He has to keep his wits about him and stay alive—and also find out what is going on. Later in the story, he has to learn to trust ex-spy Gene Hackman. Plus, Gene has to trust Will. When you can’t tell who is good or who is bad, trust does not come easily.

In the Line of Fire (d. Wolfgang Petersen, 1993) features Clint Eastwood as an aging Secret Service guy who is having trouble jogging to keep up with the presidential limousine during parades. Also, he wonders whether he isn’t too old to attract women—namely, fellow-agent Rene Russo, who is much younger than he.

More than just sticks

Here are five older thrillers that, in spite of their melodramatic story lines, have characters who have more personality than usual. They are complex and face daunting personal problems. See the films and track the development of personal conflict.

Bullitt (1968). San Francisco police detective doesn’t think much about putting himself or others in harm’s way. His girlfriend does. Directed by Peter Yates and starring Steve McQueen.

Deliverance (1972). Four men from the city go on a white-water canoeing trip. They run into a lot of trouble from nature and from mountain men. Directed by John Boorman and starring Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight.

The Man Who Would Be King (1975). Two Brits try to scam high priests of a Himalayan kingdom out of great wealth. Directed by John Huston and starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Guy robs a bank to get money for his friend’s sex-change operation, ends up having to hold employees and customers hostage for hours. Based on a true story. Directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Al Pacino.

Conflict of theme

As I have said, theme has to do with broad, overarching lessons, realities, truths. All stories have themes, even dumb ones like Speed—which is founded on the immutable truth that you can get killed driving too slow in Los Angeles. Often screenwriters don’t even know they are infusing their stories with themes. That’s okay. We’ll do the infusing. Any well-crafted story has a theme, whether the author disavows such intention or not. At the start of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain admonishes us that “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” Good readers know that Twain is funning and will do just the opposite of his dicta—that is, find motive, moral, and plot.

In Titanic, the conflict of theme has to do with the modern woman, just emerging in 1912, whom Rose personifies. Was it possible for intelligent, willful, tuned-in young women to live independent lives in that pre-World War I era? James Cameron doubtless had this large issue in mind as he drafted the story, though of course he was mightily influenced by contemporary feminism. He had to make sure Rose lived in order to keep the theme, and its possibilities, alive. Jack didn’t have to live since men already ran things.

In the Line of Fire suggests several conflicts of theme, all related to character. Here are two, which I have stated as questions:

   Do women really, deep down, prefer tough old chauvinists like Clint over younger, more sensitive men?

   What about aging and self-doubt? How do older men deal with it?

Nifty trailer for In the Line of Fire:

Technique, Structure, and Meaning

As I have noted in several previous chapters, practitioners of the film medium have developed over the decades a number of techniques in which meaning is imbedded. This chapter aims to bring some main techniques together and suggest their significance. Many of these techniques are obvious and well-known; others are less obvious.

EASILY RECOGNIZABLE TECHNIQUES

As lifelong film viewers, we have absorbed much film technique to which we instantly, even unthinkingly, attach meaning. Here is a list of such techniques.

   Bad things happen in the dark. Very few horror films take place in broad daylight.

   Quick cutting equals excitement, rapid change, perhaps danger or violence.

   Handheld, purposely jerky camerawork conveys that something is wrong; the world is out of kilter.

   Same thing for tilted camerawork, when the bottom of the frame is not parallel to the ground or floor.

   Extreme wide-angle lenses—often called fish-eye lenses—suggest altered psychological states, perhaps abnormal or threatening.

   And the opposite: scenes of verdant nature add up to harmony; slow cutting invites us to be contemplative; music in major keys tells us everything is all right.

   We love contrast, not only of setting (city vs. country) but also of characters (innocence vs. worldliness or evil). We automatically root for innocence. This is not strictly technique; but innocence can be achieved through the techniques of casting, acting, and costuming.

   Moving cameras impart fluidity to shooting and produce serenity or a sense of well-being.

   Placement of characters is important. When they are physically far apart, they are also psychologically distant. When they stand next to each other, they may be intimate, even loving.

   Close-ups isolate people; medium shots and long shots integrate them. Films dominated by close-ups often offer characters who do not connect well with other characters.

Here are some films in which these techniques are predictably found.

In Requiem for a Dream (2000), the main character Sara, played by Ellen Burstyn, is often filmed with a fish-eye lens, not always to show her point of view, but to simulate the mental state of someone addicted to mind-altering diet pills. The fish-eye lens is also used for filming scenes of Sara’s drug trips.

In the trailer for The Dark Knight (2008), the music might be listenable in its own right, if you are okay with dark and scary. It’s accompanied by lots of drums and miscellaneous sounds portending jeopardy and violence—also psychopathology.

The Dark Knight

Pan’s Labyrinth

The near-standard two-hour running time also allows for exhibitors to maximize money. If they showed nothing but three-hour films, they would have to schedule fewer screenings than if the film ran two hours. Fewer screenings, fewer tickets sold. Hollywood (and other filmmaking entities across the globe) know that audiences have been more-or-less conditioned to expect a movie to run two hours. The entire industry rests on this expectation.

Andy Warhol made a six-hour film of nothing more than a man sleeping. He did not toss and turn much. Warhol also made an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building. The structure did not move, act, speak, or emote. It just stood there, immobile. I watched an hour of Empire at a Warhol show in San Francisco, and could take no more. I left, feeling a little guilty. Why would Warhol make such a long film about such an unpromising subject? Was it a waste of film? If you look around for Warhol quotes, you will discover things like “I am a deeply superficial person” and “I like boring things” attributed to him. Call him the anti-artist who made a unique kind of art. It’s safe to say that Warhol’s longer films never played at the multiplex in Tulsa, though various museums have gathered up many of the hundreds of films he or his associates made (of varying length). They are shown occasionally at film festivals and art film venues.

Never do commercial theatres show films that run only ten or fifteen minutes. They used to. They would show cartoons from studios and newsreels, all short. Now it’s only features, trailers, and Coke commercials. This is the main reason for the dearth of experience with and knowledge about the art of the short film among the film-going public. Minute for minute, the short film is often ten times more experimental and innovative than even the boldest feature. Some festivals and art film theatres show short films, and you can always rent Academy-Award-nominated animated and live-action shorts after Oscar time. Beyond this, you have to go online and Google “short films” or “art films” to actually bring up and see short films. Thank God we have that.

I went to YouTube and found this remarkable short film:

We Have Decided Not to Die

Patrons often walk out on movies, plays, or musical works that are based on an alternate structure or have no structure. However, if all Elizabethan plays were structured this way and if all neoclassical or romantic symphonies followed this pattern, there is no invitation to contemplate meaning. But when Beethoven inserted a choir into the fourth movement of his Ninth Symphony, he was nearly lynched in Vienna. Musical connoisseurs, however, were moved to ask, How dare you deviate?

American experimental composer John Cage “wrote” a piano “piece” called 4’ 33” which instructed a pianist to stride onto stage, sit down at a piano, open the keyboard, and do nothing—play not a single note—for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Then he closed the keyboard, bowed to the largely baffled audience, and walked off the stage. Cage’s point: tune into restlessness among the audience. Hear that sound, which to Cage was just as important as anything that might emanate from the piano.

John Sayles’s Limbo (1999) does not offer a proper Act Three. Roger Ebert may have sensed why:

Juneau is the only state capital with roads that lead nowhere. Every highway out of town ends in the wilderness. That serves as a metaphor for the characters in John Sayles’s Limbo, a movie about people whose lives are neither here nor there, but stuck in-between. It also helps explain the movie’s surprising story structure, which doesn’t obediently follow our expectations, but reflects the way a wilderness like Alaska can impose its own abrupt reality.

Beethoven’s Ninth—ah, universally regarded as a masterpiece. But Limbo cost eight million to make and grossed less than two million. You alter structure, you take risks.

STRANDS

These occur in movies that tell disparate (not necessarily desperate) stories, alternating snippets until all come together and resolve in similar ways in the end. One of the first well-known movies to do this was Amores Perros (2000) by the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Here is a plot summary by an anonymous contributor to the Internet Movie Database:

You have to get used to this kind of story because it isn’t easy to follow. Actually I should have said “stories” . . . “they” because for a time you are lost. Iñárritu intends this. He wants to show not only the randomness of life but the connectedness of it as well. Octavio is poor, Daniel and Valeria are normally well off. She is—was: she lost a leg in the accident—a beautiful and successful fashion model. El Chivo is an assassin. So there you are.

In 2007 Iñárritu made another stranded story, Babel. Now there are four stories to be braided, all based on a certain rifle. The setting widens from Mexico City to the entire world. As film critic Sam Rutledge suggests, communication—or the lack of—knits the four stories. An impoverished Moroccan goat herder takes a careless pot shot at a passing bus with a rifle and seriously wounds a tourist. The husband of the wounded tourist can’t seem to contact medical people to come to his wife’s aid. Another story flies off to Japan to follow the story of a despondent Japanese teenager who is both deaf and grieving the suicide of her mother. It is her father who finally comes into possession of the rifle.

Iñárritu made a third stranded story, 21 Grams (2003), which also tells three stories in one and, like Amores Perros, is held together by a tragic traffic accident.This guy likes to work on a broad canvas. One story does not satisfy him. However, in 2010, Iñárritu made a mono-narrative, straight-ahead film called Biutiful, about a small-time crook whose cancer changes his outlook on life. Javier Bardem stars.

Two more stranded stories both better integrated—if integration is a virtue; I’m not sure it always is—are Crash (2008) by Paul Haggis and Hereafter (2010) by Clint Eastwood. The Haggis story is more narrowly concerned with law enforcement, cops, car thieves, and drug addicts. The Eastwood story is the most focused of these stranded tales. It’s about people who have had brief after-life experiences and their need to make contact with each other.

I am not sure my term strand is a valid one; I just seem to run across it when film critics discuss this kind of film. This type of film is relatively new. Film writers are still reaching for words to describe it.

SLICE AND DICE

Filmmakers are currently enamored with a style of editing that takes viewers forward and backwards in time several times during the running time of the film. The result often is confusing; however, matters usually sort themselves out in time. Sometimes cause-and-effect relationships can be established by jumping around in time, or significant contrast. This may have been the motivation of Derek Cianfrance when he made the past-present Blue Valentine in 2010.

SILENCE

. . . is often a powerful structural tool in film as well. A scene that should play to sound—say an explosion—instead plays to silence, not even music or other sound effects. Alfred Hitchcock not only used music in his Birds, he ran some of the most dramatic and scary scenes in the film to silence. No Country for Old Men (2007) by Joel and Ethan Cohen has a minimal soundtrack. Long important sequences are played to no sound at all. Dennis Lim of the New York Times wrote the following about aural technique:

“Suspense thrillers in Hollywood are traditionally done almost entirely with music,” sound editor Skip Lievsay said. “The idea here was to remove the safety net that lets the audience feel like they know what’s going to happen. I think it makes the movie much more suspenseful. You’re not guided by the score and so you lose that comfort zone.”

Characters

Good screenwriters invite you to think about what their characters mean, and the directors they work for find myriad ways of amplifying significance in costuming, facial expression, body language, words, language, and action.

Two chapters ago I suggested you be sensitive to three kinds of meaning: epic, mythic, and thematic. Epic meaning has to do with the broad sweep of a nation’s remembered history, its values, outlooks, and practices. Mythic meaning extends back to the very roots of culture and is often unspoken and unacknowledged. Thematic meaning may be the most useful and honest of the three. We might question the epic significance of the so-called Old South; we might dismiss the myth of the tortoise and the hare as wishful thinking. But when a character stands for some obviously true condition of society or human nature (i.e., a theme), we ought to pay attention.

Here are thumbnail analyses of several films whose main characters embody these three types of meaning.

LIKABLE CHARACTERS WITH HISTORICAL OR SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE

Screenwriters generally prefer to present us with likable, winning characters. There’s frankly more money in it.

Kathy Selden (singer and actress in Singin’ in the Rain, 1952). This film takes place during the movie industry’s disruptive transition to synchronized sound—“talkies.” Debbie Reynolds’s character Kathy Selden dubs the songs of established silent-era star actress Lina Lamont, whose voice is so silly she threatens to make a movie in production a joke. Selden is forbearing and modest, never craving attention or stardom. But star Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly), in love with Kathy, raises the curtain on her backstage so that she finally gets the recognition she deserves.

Kathy Selden is likable (at least to most viewers in the 1950s) because she is so demure. Women were expected to be like this in the 1950s. Selden wins us over by “being nice.” This mythology pervaded the 1950s and is still with us today: we believe nice pays off, people—male and female.

Princess Ann (Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, 1953) didn’t get her man. Being nice was only part of the issue. She decided to return to her super-boring job of being a princess and emissary for her country because it was her duty to do so. In those years, duty ruled. Reporter Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck again), though in love with Ann, would not for a moment consider hitting on her. Just wasn’t done by respectable males in 1953—or at least Hollywood would have us believe as much.

Howard Beale (news anchor Peter Finch in Network, 1976). This film is about corporate irresponsibility. A TV network with sagging ratings is tempted to turn news into entertainment (a new idea perhaps in 1976, but commonplace today). Beale is fed up with corporate “bullshit” and threatens to shoot himself on his last telecast. He angrily demands that his viewers go to their windows, fling them open, and shout, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Unexpectedly, Beale’s ratings soar. A shrewd programmer plugs in more condescending “counterculture” shows.

Network

I don’t mean all-out villains such as the demonic Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) who wires a bus to explode in Speed (1994). I mean characters that have some subtlety about them and bear on meaning.

Ethan Edwards (as a Civil War vet and now a “Westerner” in The Searchers, 1956). John Wayne did not play wimpy roles. Here he is typical Wayne—in control, resourceful, and charismatic. The film is based on a search of several years as Ethan goes up and down the land trying to find Debbie (Natalie Wood), kidnapped by Indians. When he does he at first wants to kill her—because she has been violated by creatures regarded as subhuman and doesn’t deserve to live.

The Searchers

Kit and Holly (a garbage man and drifter, and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend in Badlands, 1972). Kit, played by Martin Sheen, is likable throughout the movie, despite bad doings. He is resourceful—he builds a tree house, and he respects Holly, played by Sissy Spacek. Then he kills Holly’s father and burns down Holly’s house. The two hit the road; Kit continues to kill.

Badlands is based on actual events. Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate killed and ran, ran and killed, across the Midwest in the 1950s. Traditional psychology or stereotypes about rotten youth don’t seem to apply, so senseless were their crimes. Also, director Terrence Malick presents the duo’s crime spree without melodrama or an exaggerated sense of anyone being victimized. Malick tweaks the story here and there to nudge you to liking Kit and Holly. He adds classical “found” music that bends your sympathy. Along with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), you are presented with criminals who invite you to like them. Terrence Malick wrote the screenplay. Trailer:

Badlands

Bud Shulberg wrote the screenplay, and Elia Kazan directed.

Oskar Schindler (industrialist in Schindler’s List, played by Liam Neeson, 1993). Schindler prospers from his enamelware factory run by Jewish slave labor in Nazi Germany during WWII. But halfway through the movie he comes to realize how immoral his actions have been. He finally works behind the scenes and with great shrewdness to rescue thousands of Jews from the gas chambers. One key word dominates the theme: redemption. Book by Steven Zaillian, screenplay by Thomas Keneally, directed by Steven Spielberg.

Schindler’s List

We might speculate: Lester is the beneficiary of Americans who, midlife, reevaluate and start over. In the early years of my decades-long teaching career at an open-door community college, I seldom had an older student who wished to start a new life. Nearly all my charges were 18, 19, 20, and had not been bitten by life. They had not thought much about rebooting their lives. Older “nontraditional students”—as the college called them—did not start arriving at my college in any numbers until the 1980s. Many were scorned as abandoning their families and steady jobs for flighty reasons. True, a few wanted to be poets and, I guess, were less than practical. But to them, writing poetry was more soul-nourishing than working at Handi-Lube.

Who was I or anyone to question their motives? Now it’s common to have students in college classrooms in their thirties, forties, and fifties, and they are generally admired as lifelong learners and risk takers. Some want to be poets, though most are after something “practical,” like inhalation therapy. This is not thematic. It’s epical. It’s widespread change in American society, and the recession that afflicts Americans as I write this has hastened the trend as people scramble to retool their working lives. Lester was not concerned with occupational retooling; his was spiritual. Screenwriter: Alan Ball; director: Sam Mendes. Dreamish clip from American Beauty:

American Beauty

Savvy screenwriters know they can hang an involving story on characters who become selfish, immoral, and destructive over time.

Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, 1941). This film is about power and lost innocence. Kane turns a second-rate NYC newspaper into a great success. Early on he supports struggling people, but always paternalistically. He uses his great wealth to buy European art he really has no feeling for. He forces his wife into an opera career she doesn’t want. He ends up a bitter and lonely man.

Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream, 2000). As a contributor to IMDB writes, the plot is, “Drugs. They consume mind, body and soul. . . . Four lives [including Sara’s]. Four addicts. Four failures. . . . Watching the addicts spiral out of control, we bear witness to the dirtiest, ugliest portions of the underworld addicts reside in.”

Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis as an oilman in There Will be Blood, 2007). Set in California in the early decades of the twentieth century, this film depicts lying, cheating, and even murdering to acquire oil-rich land. In the end Daniel is friendless and wifeless. It is another indictment of stop-at-nothing capitalism. Novel by Upton Sinclair; screenplay and direction by Paul Thomas Anderson.

Ambiguous trailer forThere Will be Blood:

Relationships

Film critics and academics like to talk about individual characters in films, but overall they pay far less attention to character relationships in films. Too bad, because often the relationships turn out to be more important than individual characters. Often you can’t begin to know these characters unless you know how they relate to each other and to other characters. We can see individual characters, observe facial features and note how they speak and act. But we can’t see relationships. Relationships in fact are not tangible. They are incorporeal, inferred, sometimes even not entirely clear. Maybe this is why they have received less attention than they should have.

LITTLE IN COMMON

Here are two films with characters that superficially have little or nothing in common, and yet they are based on strong relationships—one positive, the other negative.

The Way, Way Back

The film then is a puzzle. Why are the boys acting like this? Why isn’t the discipline of the men working? Some critics of the film half-believe that The White Ribbon leads down, in time, to the obscenities of Nazism. Others feel this interpretation is too simplistic. Many viewers feel that the stern treatment men mete out to boys is a large part of the problem, but the exact nature of the problem is elusive.

Haneke altered the footage to produce harsh, dark, black and white footage.

The White Ribbon

Men dominate too in Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010), a slice of Ozark Mountain sexism which I have mentioned twice before. A teenage girl, Ree, has to find her father who skipped bail. If he doesn’t show up in court, Ree, her mentally challenged mother, and her two younger brothers will lose their home. But the code of these hill people is to keep their mouths shut, and that applies doubly to women. Here is a bit of dialogue between Ree and her uncle, called Teardrop. You sense the sexism in how he talks to her.

TEARDROP: [Ree’s father] Jessup never would smack you. I don’t know why, why he never would, but I always have said someday somebody’s goin’ to pay a price for him not whomping’ you good when you needed it.

REE: I wasn’t trying to be a smart mouth, there. Teardrop. Uncle Teardrop.

In Silence of the Lambs (1991), Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) doesn’t physically dominate neophyte FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jody Foster)—he’s actually behind bars—but he is of such a pathological and intimidating turn of mind that he frightens Clarice. Lecter is a crazed killer who eats his victims. Before embarking on his perverse murder career, Lecter was a respected psychiatrist, and Clarice has some raw talent for getting people to reveal their deepest thoughts. So she has approached Lecter in prison to wrest clues from him about another nutcase murderer on the loose, a guy who strips away the skin from his victims. You may wonder why the FBI would send a beginner to undertake this gruesome task. Screenwriter Ted Tally never explicitly says why, but you can’t help but sense cynical motives: the young, attractive Clarice is sexual bait who might succeed in pulling secrets from Lecter when experienced and better trained shrinks have failed.

There are themes and universals aplenty in this story. The whole narrative setup is sexist, of course. And ambition—the lengths Clarice, or any beginner, will go to get promoted. And bravery to prove one’s self. And that peculiar aspect of human nature that draws us to perversity. Not even innocent-seeming young women are immune to it.

The Silence of the Lambs

Nearly as famous as Romeo and Juliet are Kathy and Heathcliff in William Wylers’s Wuthering Heights (1939), based on the searing novel of the same title penned by Emily Bronte in 1847. Social class is the main wedge between the lovers. Also cooling ardor, as Kathy comes to love Heathcliff less and less.

The theme of these various failed romances is felt frequently today in real-world love affairs between people who come from different backgrounds—in fact, intolerant backgrounds: Christians and Jews, Sunnis and Shiites, Blacks and Whites, rich and poor, whether it’s unfair or not. These mismatched romances are probably more numerous in contemporary times as the movements of people across the globe means mates whom parents disapprove of meet and imprudently fall in love. As a counterbalance, tolerance too is on the upswing.

CRIME-BASED LOVE AFFAIRS

Screenwriters are fond of basing love affairs on crime, including robbery and murder for which the couples have to go on the run. I’ve already mentioned the Arthur Penn version of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) in several previous chapters. And I’ve written about Badlands (1973) in which Kit and Holly seem so much in love they scarcely think about the morality of their crimes, nor do viewers. But the champion film about love on the run is probably Natural-Born Killers, made in 1996 by Oliver Stone. Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) don’t just kill defensively; they take great pleasure in killing. They always leave one victim alive so he can explain to the authorities what exactly happened.

The only thematic sense I can make of these crime-ridden relationships is that they are metaphors for the craziness of passion. Lovers do act stupid, take chances, break the rules. Screenwriters can’t resist surrounding such tales of need with the most cinematic and compelling of plot devices, crime—the more grisly the better.

The original on-the-run love story is Gun Crazy, directed by Joseph H. Lewis in 1950. There is not much in the way of metaphor here. Bart and Annie simply relish shooting guns. So they start robbing banks. Soon though, Annie involves Bart in much worse crimes. She is two shades more pathological than he is. Here is a classic clip from the film:

So these two pairs of characters, Owen and Abby and Mike and Scott, are very brave indeed. They establish relationships that are alternatives to conventional living—we ought to run from vampires and, some think, gays.

A film with a doomed and poignant feel is Never Let Me Go (2010), about a misguided futuristic society that clones human beings for later organ harvesting. This film, directed by the American Mark Romanek and set in Great Britain, centers on three adolescents, two girls and a boy, who attend a special school for clones, a kind of upper-crust institution. These children don’t really understand what their lives are about or who they are until halfway through the story. When finally they learn they are expendable—expected and required to provide three vital organs to real people. They understandably become melancholy and establish strong bonds with each other. The film is an account of their sad bonding. One by one they are wheeled into the operating room to give up a liver, a lung, a heart, en route to death.

You can imagine the kind of relationships these children form upon learning of their fates. Two fall in love, a love of desperation, driven partly by the false rumor that young lovers will be allowed to “defer” their ultimate fate. Few moments in film are as wrenching as when the three learn the rumor is untrue. Truths pour from the film. Similar bonding must take place among children living in hospital wards for terminal illnesses, or wartime, or extreme societal changes that bring about dislocation and poverty. The strength of the film rests on the unfairness of it all, which viewers can’t quite shake off. That and the contemplation of what it means, and what it takes, to be human—and be accorded the rights of humans. A similar theme pervades Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) in which Harrison Ford falls in love with a “replicant”—a manufactured woman—with a limited life span. Official trailer for

Never Let Me Go

The heart of the story though is not speech correction but social-class distance. At first George would not let his guard down with his therapist because Lionel was, after all, a mere servant and a commoner—and a colonial to boot. Lionel’s method depended on trust and friendship. George finally understood this and accepted Lionel as an equal—no, as a superior, someone he could depend on and admire. The two developed a lifelong friendship. Trailer:

The King’s Speech

Buddy films:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Female_buddy_films

Setting

No film is set arbitrarily. Starting with the screenwriter’s intentions, settings are meant to shape lives, reflect on character, reveal values, stir strong feelings, drive story, and supply meaning.

My aim in this chapter is to present you with a miscellany of settings, and to comment on what each may say about the films arising from them. I want to make you setting-conscious.

Below are stills from two entirely different settings.

The rural setting linked below includes a gas station and a B grade motel in Texas, from the Oscar-winning film Tender Mercies (1983). Had the proprietor of the business, a widowed woman by the name of Rosa Lee (played by Tess Harper), not been stuck out in the middle of nowhere, it may not have occurred to her to get romantically involved with the alcoholic country-western singer Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall) who sobers up in one of her rooms. Mac is nearly reformed and his nice-guy-ness shines through; all the same, at first, he would not be considered a good risk. But Rosa Lee takes a chance on him, maybe in large part because she just doesn’t have a lot of prospects. The film never says this. It’s a level of meaning you have to read into, taking setting into account. It provides a dimension of desperation that would not have characterized the film had it been set in high-opportunity Dallas.

Tender Mercies

The Best Years of Our Lives

The man in the foreground with his back to the camera is a discharged Army officer looking for work in an economy he doesn’t understand. He is confused by all the hurly-burly. The new business practices will strike him as colder, crueler, more narrowly profit-driven than the gentler, kinder business ethic of America before the war. The shot is actually satiric: the clutter is overstated to make a comment about retail practices of the time. This shot is a good example of rendering an abstraction—here, good business—into something concrete.

SETTING AS JOURNEY

It matters where people are bound. The shot linked below is from the classic flick The Grapes of Wrath (1940). The Joad family, dispossessed of home and farm, hopes to get back on its feet in California. But the quest is ironic. Instead of the land of milk and honey, California will turn out to be just as indifferent and cruel to desperate people as Oklahoma was before. It’s a timeless tale of hopes raised and hopes dashed.

The Grapes of Wrath

Stand by Me (1986) is a story of four chums who learn that there is a boy’s body out in the countryside next to a railroad track. Their discovery of the body changes all of them, and also changes their relationships to each other. It’s a journey to maturity.

Trailer for Stand by Me:

Star Wars

SETTINGS OF POVERTY

Rain slows you down, makes you miserable. The poor are already slowed down enough. But when you have to find your stolen bicycle in the rain and have to drag your kid along, everything is worse. Why is the bicycle so important? If the man can’t find it, he can’t go to work. If he can’t go to work, his family won’t eat. The shot linked below is from The Bicycle Thief, the great Italian film of 1948.

The Bicycle Thief

Tsotsi

Much of Old Joy (2006) is set in the Olympic Rain Forest of Washington state. It looks so tranquil, so comforting. But not all is well between the two men. The two used to be hippie types, carefree and unattached. But the second man has settled into a job and family. The men aren’t really going to connect. Nature beckons to no avail. I am going to suggest that the past is on the right bank, the present and future on the left.

Old Joy

Deliverance

If you direct a film set in nature, you need to ask what kind of nature it is—kind, bracing, indifferent, threatening? Then you order your director of photography to compose and light scenes accordingly.

SETTINGS OF CRIME

Two kinds of crime settings: urban and rural.

The setting in the darkish shot below from the 1944 film Double Indemnity is a nice house in suburban Los Angeles. Leggy Barbara Stanwyck comes with the setting. She’s out to ensnare insurance man Fred MacMurray in a murder scheme.

Double Indemnity

Fargo

SETTINGS OF POLITICAL OPPRESSION

The shot linked below is taken from The Lives of Others (2006), a film about repression in East Germany before the fall of global communism. People were picked up for writing bad stuff about the government, interrogated, sent to prison.

The Lives of Others

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days

SETTINGS IN WESTERN FILMS

The still below from Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) was shot at a place called Agoura in Los Angeles County in California where many of Paramount’s Westerns were set. It was convenient to shoot in and around the little community of Agoura because the place was close to Paramount’s facilities. Transportation and logistics were simplified, expenses correspondingly reduced. We have come to expect Westerns with this kind of dry, empty look as default. Thousands of Westerns by many studios looked like this, most of them telling long-established, time-honored stories of individualism, derring-do, and feats of courage—Western staples.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

Shane

The next still is from an off-beat Western called McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), directed by Robert Altman in 1971. It too is set in mountains, signifying something different in Western narrative—namely, pure, two-fisted capitalism. The film stars Warren Beatty and Julie Christie.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

But the setting which most film viewers are likely to associate with Western films is Monument Valley in Arizona, where John Ford and other directors set so many of their Westerns. Those grand, tabletop mesas—on some level they stood for a whole clutch of Western values: sturdiness, dependability, manliness. Just think John Wayne.

Stagecoach

SETTINGS IN ART FILMS

The trailer below is from Being John Malkovich (1999). The office people work in is only about 4½ feet high. Director Spike Jonze presents a lot of oddities like this in the movie, but he doesn’t make a big deal of any of them. They just are. No critic I have read dares explain them, including the biggest: sliding into the actual brain of John Malkovich through a low door in the office and seeing through his eyes. The setting simply makes the film nutty without digital tricks, and most viewers, I think, accept it for what it is.

Being John Malkovich

Casualties of War

Symbols, Metaphors, Allegories, and Meaningful Details

Screenwriters, directors, and cinematographers seldom put anything you can see or hear into a movie that means nothing or is arbitrary. Everything you see that strikes your senses in a movie—even color, texture, and pattern—is intended to reveal character, crank up conflict, advance the theme, or otherwise get you to think. Everything. Other production personnel contribute. Costume designers have ideas about what characters should wear; set dressers know how to reflect outlook or lifestyle in furniture and décor; even editors know that how a scene is cut imparts meaning. And of course whatever music flows from movies is intended to set moods.

Seldom do movie people utter the word symbol, even less metaphor or allegory. They are too practical for language like that. But meaningful detail—maybe. More likely, when shown a range of props, costumes, or when visiting possible filming locations, they will say Okay, that’s fine or Show me more.

All artists—poets, novelists, painters, even music composers—deal with symbols and their near relatives. But beware: as a viewer, you can get symbol-obsessed, and look for them where they aren’t meant to carry much weight and miss other things about a movie. At the same time, noticing important details can certainly enhance understanding.

Let’s first look at two kinds of symbols.

. . . occur in the course of telling more or less realistic film stories. They do not especially call attention to themselves. If you do not ponder them, you would not be severely handicapped understanding the film. On the other hand, if you do, you might understand deeper implications and enhance your viewing.

Here are some naturally occurring symbols in well-known films, some of which I have discussed before.

Will Smith’s constant running in The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

Will runs all the time in this film. He has to run to get to a doctor’s office at a certain time. He runs to pick up his son at the daycare center. He runs to get to the homeless shelter before the line grows too long. Often he runs with the heavy bone density scanner he is trying to sell to physicians to stay afloat. Viewers variously laugh or feel sorry for him. Will runs so much that you have to ask what screenwriter Steve Conrad had in mind. Most likely the running is just a quick, unpretentious way of saying life is hard for Will. The heavy scanner is a drudge. All this is natural, unforced.

Light and dark in All the President’s Men (1976)

I’ve said this before but I’m going to repeat myself here. When scenes are shot with a lot of light they imply clarity, disclosure, good fortune. But when they are shot mostly in the dark, they mean just the opposite: something sinister or foreboding is about to happen. Gordon Willis shot All the President’s Men this way. The scenes of Woodward and Bernstein in the Washington Post newsroom are brightly lit as the pair is gathering evidence concerning Watergate. But when Woodward meets “Deep Throat” in the parking structure, Willis keeps light levels very low. Deep Throat is not very cooperative, and the investigation is stymied.

Highway 66 in The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

Wide-angle/deep-focus photography in Citizen Kane (1941)

I’ve said this before too; it’s worth repeating: lenses and their optical results may be considered symbolic. There are many intrusive symbols in this film, and I’ll mention a few later, but few viewers notice how perspective has been exaggerated to suggest how the billionaire Charles Foster Kane lives in such spacious surroundings. Wide-angle lenses make backgrounds seem farther off than they really are so that the castle called Xanadu that Kane lives in with his unfulfilled wife seems enormous. Next time you see the film note the fireplace scene in the sitting room. Optics makes the room seem like the size of a basketball court. You don’t realize how high and wide the fireplace is until Kane walks to it. Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles wrote the picture.

Citizen Kane

Bailey Savings and Loan in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Homelessness in City Lights (1931)

We never see where Charlie Chaplin lives in this poignant film about a down-and-out man who talks a millionaire into paying for the corrective surgery of a young blind woman. Some film critics call this lack of abode a structuring absence. To actually show Charlie in a shelter or a cold-water flat would be more realism than the film could bear. Director Chaplin, one of the most understated of film directors, decided to let his tattered clothes communicate this by themselves. Written by Chaplin.

The rain in Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

What many viewers forget is that Gene has just tried to get into Debbie’s . . . apartment (I almost used another word), but she has turned him away. His prancing about in the rain is like taking a cold shower. Is he sad? Frustrated? Horny? Nope. This is 1952 when you couldn’t show men in movies that way. Kelly overcompensates—singing, laughing, throwing his arms out—so viewers won’t think horny for one second. Screenplay by Adolph Green and Betty Comden.

Balloons in Up (2009)

Balloons drive this film—maybe “drive” isn’t the right word. “Lift” is better. You think they are cute, not especially symbolic. The mind would rather work literally and connotatively before it works symbolically. Of course it’s unbelievable that a cluster of them could rip a house from its foundation and catch a wind to South America. But you go along. This is a cartoon, after all. Your gut reaction to balloons is that they are fun, frivolous, youthful. Old Carl isn’t exactly fun or frivolous, but he’s on his own highway 66 of the sky toward his youth. Pete Docter and Bob Peterson directed.

INTRUSIVE SYMBOLS

These cry out for immediate interpretation. They don’t occur naturally. You can tell right away that the screenwriter and the director have cooked up something they want you to understand. They want you to stop everything, think symbol, and get into an intellectual frame of mind.

The monoliths in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

2001: A Space Odyssey

The stag at Balmoral in The Queen (2006)

Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) is out driving alone in her Land Rover, tooling around the hills and valleys of this 50,000-acre royal preserve. Her husband, Prince Philip, is after the stags, but is having trouble finding them. Elizabeth stops the vehicle. And there, in the middle distance, is a wondrous stag, immobile, looking back at Elizabeth. She weeps. (You can just make out the stag out of focus in the midground of the image below.) The nation had suspected that Elizabeth had no emotional reaction to Diana’s death, which had occurred just days before this encounter and was the occasion for the Royal family escaping to Balmoral. She does not get on her cell to Philip and say, “I found a stag for you.” Instead she just gazes, awestruck by—life. Does she weep for the stag, which Philip later catches up to and dispatches? Does she weep for Diana? For the nation? It’s a complicated, intrusive symbol, and damn it, you can’t just skip over it. Peter Morgan wrote the screenplay.

The Queen

You don’t see these much nowadays. It’s a glass sphere with a flat bottom for placing on a stack of papers to keep them from blowing away, in an era (1930s) when fans, not air conditioners, cooled offices. Often these objects contained a scene from nature. If you turned the sphere upside down, little specks of white, like snow, suspended in water floated down. The whole presentation is idyllic, even primal, in its appeal. The paperweight is seen several times in the story, most notably when Kane is trashing his wife Susan’s boudoir in anger after she leaves him. He pauses on the paperweight. He utters “rosebud” as he gazes at it. Which takes us to a child’s sled named “rosebud” you see being tossed into a furnace at the very end of the film, which in turn takes us to Kane’s childhood, dramatized early in the film, when he is at play in snow on his sled. A symbol inside a symbol within a symbol. You probably won’t pause the film to think all these symbols through while you are watching Citizen Kane, but maybe you will that night or the next day. Somehow you come to lost innocence.

Citizen Kane

The chest armor in Wings of Desire (1987)

. . . which the angel Damiel wears as he completes his transition from angel to human. This symbol, though intrusive—is pretty easy to understand: you never see him wearing the armor in the rest of the movie. You have to remove the armor and be vulnerable if you are to be human. Peter Handke and Richard Reitinger wrote.

The rain of frogs in Magnolia (1999)

Magnolia

This is a story about a weatherman on a local Chicago TV station. He has the usual local weather-guy talent for getting through the weather fast with a winning smile, and wanting to be taken as useful in the world. But his domestic life is a mess. He is alienated from wife and daughter. In an attempt to reconnect with the daughter, he takes her out to an archery range. She is not a very good archer and doesn’t take much interest in the sport. But why archery? Why this activity? Why not a movie and dinner, an amusement park, a picnic—more traditional dad-trying-to-reconcile things to do? The symbol, if it is one, calls much attention to itself. You can’t help but think about archery: traditional? skill-based? Robin Hood? A masculine thing to do? A bad choice? I never could figure it out. I just thought of this: maybe his choice of archery shows what a bad father he is. Steve Conrad wrote the screenplay.

METAPHORS

To me, there’s not much difference between symbols and metaphors. Both stand for something else. What one commentator calls a symbol another calls a metaphor. It doesn’t matter much. I suggest metaphors are long-running and maybe more complex symbols. They might embrace an entire film. The Godfather saga has often been called a metaphor for capitalism. It’s not personal, it’s business is something a boss could tell a worker he has to lay off. Here are a few films that might be based on metaphors:

The sinking of the great boat in Titanic (1997)

This stands for the demise of what the French called “La Belle Époque,” or what Americans called “The Gilded Age” and the British “Edwardian.” It lasted from the middle of the industrial revolution to World War I. It was characterized by the existence of obscenely rich people, a disregard for the poor, rampant corruption, and sumptuous living. The sinking of one grand ocean liner did not by itself bring down the era; it took unions, riots, and movements toward welfare states to bring about change. Director and writer James Cameron perceived all this in the historically true event.

The call to build a baseball diamond in Field of Dreams (1989)

The assembling of Frankenstein’s monster in Frankenstein (1931, 1994)

This is a metaphor for messing with science and having it bite you back. It’s retrogressive, anti-science. It appeals on a deep level to people who are afraid of science. The monster gets loose, strangles people, and drowns a little girl, among other bad things. The story is also one of the models for “mad” scientist motifs.

The four gunfighters in The Wild Bunch (1969)

A metaphor for the closing of the wild and gracious west, the West of Stagecoach, Shane, and Red River. The four—William Holden, Ben Johnson, Ernest Borgnine, and Warren Oates—are not young men. They want to pull off one last job before settling down with Mexican whores. But this is not an imbedded metaphor. It lies right on the surface of the story for any viewer to pick up, and the men talk about the good ol’ days. Automobiles pass through towns. But instead of pulling off the last big job, they go Old West, and avenge a youthful companion tortured by the Mexican army. It’s a “see-you-in-hell” ending. It’s what a man’s gotta do.

ALLEGORIES

I like the definition of allegory from dictionary.com: “. . . a representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning through concrete or material forms; figurative treatment of one subject under the guise of another.” In this sense, allegories are closer to metaphors than to symbols. They run through entire movies. But people don’t always agree on the allegorical meaning of movies. Often they seem far-fetched and oddly personal. Examples:

The Western movie High Noon (1952) is an allegory about Americans’ unwillingness to confront the communist menace.

The sci-fi film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is an allegory about how communist thinking insidiously invades people’s consciousness and softens them up for eventual take-over by the Soviets.

This film was made a few years after High Noon and “on the surface”—allegorists like the phrase “on the surface”—is about alien life forms invading earth and laying their eggs in human beings. When the eggs hatch, the humans become docile and zombielike. On that deeper level of allegory, some American paranoids saw the movie as a wake-up call to resist communist brainwashing, which supposedly had infested government and entertainment. Fortunately, the movie can be enjoyed today without the Soviet trappings. In fact, many sequels of the story have been produced in less hysterical times.

The Lord of the Rings series (2001, etc.) is an allegory for many events and horrors of WWII.

Tolkien was a participant of WWI and an observer—as were all Brits—of WWII. If you wish, you can trace many unhappy events of these two wars in the trilogy, thus transforming it, in your mind, to allegory instead of fantasy narrative.

The Lord of the Rings series is an allegory for racism.

Some “experts” want you to notice the dark complexion and outright ugliness of Grishnákh, a captain in the Orc army. He seems to perpetuate the unfortunate misconception that all dark-skin people are ugly and evil.

Smart-alecky allegorists are often over the top. If you want to find out just how far over the top they are, visit Read Junk:

As you can tell, most allegorists are bullshitters. I advise that you pay very little attention to symbols and the like and just look at film scenes, and note the care and professionalism that went into them. This is more fruitful than symbol sleuthing.

For example, the movie The Hangover (2009) is about two guys on the verge of marriage on one last fling in Las Vegas. Imagine what fun the set dresser and prop master had spreading stuff around to make the scenes of their trashed apartment look like a complete mess—the glasses, the bottles, the paper, the food. All in the service of this one “symbol”: the guys are slobs.

There are people working in Hollywood who make good money selecting drapes for movie interiors. Or empty beer bottles. Or Big Mac wrappers. That’s all they do—select, hang, and arrange. Drapes in movies have to “look right.” I personally take as much pleasure in noting details like the style of drapes in scenes as in following story or meaning. I rarely think symbol. But we all have our viewing styles.

Wrap-Up: An Analysis of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

I close the book with an analysis of a famous film called An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by the French filmmaker Robert Enrico. The story is an adaptation of a short story originally published in 1890 and written by the American Ambrose Bierce. Enrico’s film was released in 1962. Both story and film enjoy tremendous international reputations. Even though the film has some years on it and is “pre-digital,” it amounts to a compendium of intelligent application of basic film techniques. It displays just about all the cinematic devices—meaningful frames, sounds, and cuts—I discuss in this book.

The film is about twenty-five minutes long; a middling good “print” of the film is available online, though it looks better when not enlarged. Here is the link:

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Opening shots

All are shot from a great distance from the bridge, and all are set on dolly tracks (Chapters 1 and 3) with the camera moving always left to right. We see the bridge, the creek, and soldiers standing ritualistically at attention awaiting the hanging of a civilian, an apparently well-to-do Southern planter by the name of Peyton Farquhar who has attempted to sabotage the Owl Creek bridge over which runs an important rail line serving the Union. You can tell from costuming that the story takes place during the American Civil War.

But the rope breaks! Farquhar plunges into the water!

Underwater

Farquhar is underwater for ninety seconds covered in a dozen shots. Surely he will drown, viewers think. He can’t use his arms to swim to the surface. He can’t use his legs. Again, editor de Casabianca cuts these shots very long. Somehow Farquhar unties the rope around his wrists. He slips out of the bonds around his legs. He pulls his boots off. One boot floats leisurely downstream. De Casabianca allows the camera to follow it for many seconds.

Finally Farquhar, unhurt and unencumbered, swims away from the bridge at 12:50. He’s not a very good swimmer. He ought to be shot, end of story. But he thrashes away as soldiers move in slo-mo to set up, aim, and fire. They either look completely incompetent or are so restricted by the waiting of the order to fire that they are rendered ineffective.

Rapids and sand bar

Farquhar finally gets going. He keeps on swimming away from the bridge. He hits some rapids (15:20) which transport him out of rifle range of the bridge. He floats onto a sand bar, bleeding but very much alive—in fact, ecstatic. He laughs. He throws sand in the air. He rolls onto his back, mocking death. Then, inexplicably, a grapeshot is fired down river at him at 19:20, apparently at Farquhar. It scares him enough for him to get up and run.

Running

Match cut

But now the frame is shot with a normal lens (25:30). The telephoto perspective we are used to is replaced with trees that look realistically spaced and in focus, a signal that the fantasy is about to end. Farquhar is about to embrace Abby just as we hear a terrible snapping of a thick rope (26:00) and a death yell. Farquhar dips and throws his head back. Match cut to the bridge as Farquhar’s head snaps back and he dangles from the end of the bridge rope.

Last paragraph of Bierce’s story

Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.